I can see clearly now...

Remedying poor vision has along history. Spectacles are believed to have been invented by Salvino D'Armate of Florence in 1284. Contact lenses took another 600 years to materialise. Although Leonardo da Vinci sketched a few ideas describing these lenses in 1508 he never made any, and neither did the philosopher René Descartes, who in 1632 suggested that a lens placed directly on the eye would be a way of correcting vision. In 1801, professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution in London, Thomas Young made a water-filled tube with a tiny lens at the end, which he fitted over his eye but such a design was not practical. Finally, in 1888, F. A. Muller, a glass-blower in Wiesbaden, Germany, made the first glass lens for a patient who had no eyelids. The lens completely covered the front of the eye, and was available for 20 years. However, other patients, notably those of a Dr Adolph Fick at the Ophthalmic Clinic in Zurich, complained that such 'contact lenses' were too uncomfortable to wear for more than a couple of hours and preferred to use spectacles.