Benjamin Franklin Bifocals - Why They"re Still Popular Today
Benjamin Franklin bifocals feature two different lenses squeezed into a single eye piece.
It is a simple but ingenious invention that has been used by almost every culture and every country in the world.
And it all began with a frustrated older gentleman desiring to bring some simplicity to the basic task of wearing corrective spectacles.
Benjamin Franklin was already known as a great inventor and a well-respected elder statesman when he grew tired of swapping two different pairs of glasses.
He had little to prove to anyone while fathering a new nation and being credited with with dozens of inventions and discoveries.
Yet he still created one of his most pervasive and persistent contributions to the world while just trying to solve a basic nuisance in his day-to-day life.
It was a common sense creation that has stood the test of time for people all around the world.
So many of us persevere frustrating details of our daily lives without taking action to improve those frustrations...
not Ben Franklin.
When the brilliant old Dr.
Benjamin Franklin grew weary of swapping eyeglasses to view distances then swapping them back again to clearly view his reading materials, he did something about it.
In about 1774 Benjamin Franklin simply took the upper half of the lens from his distance glasses and the lower half from his reading lens and grafted them together.
Now people only need to lower their gaze for reading and raise their gaze for seeing their loved ones clearly while conversing.
These Benjamin Franklin bifocals feature convex lenses for near vision and concave lenses for distant vision, all combined together into a single handy pair of glasses.
They weren't actually called bifocals until 1924, when John Isacc Hawkins, the inventor of the trifocal lens, credited Benjamin Franklin for inventing the bifocal reading glasses half a century earlier.
It is a simple but ingenious invention that has been used by almost every culture and every country in the world.
And it all began with a frustrated older gentleman desiring to bring some simplicity to the basic task of wearing corrective spectacles.
Benjamin Franklin was already known as a great inventor and a well-respected elder statesman when he grew tired of swapping two different pairs of glasses.
He had little to prove to anyone while fathering a new nation and being credited with with dozens of inventions and discoveries.
Yet he still created one of his most pervasive and persistent contributions to the world while just trying to solve a basic nuisance in his day-to-day life.
It was a common sense creation that has stood the test of time for people all around the world.
So many of us persevere frustrating details of our daily lives without taking action to improve those frustrations...
not Ben Franklin.
When the brilliant old Dr.
Benjamin Franklin grew weary of swapping eyeglasses to view distances then swapping them back again to clearly view his reading materials, he did something about it.
In about 1774 Benjamin Franklin simply took the upper half of the lens from his distance glasses and the lower half from his reading lens and grafted them together.
Now people only need to lower their gaze for reading and raise their gaze for seeing their loved ones clearly while conversing.
These Benjamin Franklin bifocals feature convex lenses for near vision and concave lenses for distant vision, all combined together into a single handy pair of glasses.
They weren't actually called bifocals until 1924, when John Isacc Hawkins, the inventor of the trifocal lens, credited Benjamin Franklin for inventing the bifocal reading glasses half a century earlier.
Source...