The Spectacles

Before spectacles old age meant early retirement for most monks and scholars. When people age their eyesight usually gets worse and gets blurry and most scholars whole job is basically just reading and writing about certain subjects need their vision to read and write correctly. People who study vision like Al Hazen who were great at optics and vision started using lenses – which were known to make things look bigger and light fires – to fix bad eyesight. Like most things they spread by being bought by the rich who could stand to lose a bit of money then by the common people who knew they were safe since the rich people kept buying them. It was Johann Kepler who finally determined that refraction drives vision in the eye