The Man Who Invented Glasses Was Forgotten From History

In 13th-century Europe, scholars, monks, and merchants watched their careers end the moment their vision began to fail.

The tools to fix that existed in fragments — Roman curiosity, Islamic optics, Venetian glassmaking — but no one had put them together yet. Until an unknown friar did, around 1285, in a workshop that history has never been able to name.

This episode traces the History of Spectacles: from the reading stones of medieval monasteries to Ibn al-Haytham's revolutionary Book of Optics, from a Dominican friar who shared what the inventor refused to, to the Florentine historian who in 1684 carved a fake name into a tomb. It took 236 years to prove it was a lie.

Along the way: Pope Leo X squinting at Raphael's canvas, Benjamin Franklin cutting two pairs of glasses in half, Sam Foster selling tinted lenses on an Atlantic City boardwalk in 1929, and a Baltimore Colts wide receiver who shouldn't have been able to see the field at all.

Chapters
0:00 — Introduction and The Monk Who Lost His Sight
1:11 — Light Before Glass: Ancient Clues
3:26 — The Invention: Italy, 1285
5:34 — The Secret, the Friar, and the Forgery
8:25 — How Spectacles Changed the World
10:18 — The Other Half: Seeing at a Distance and Bifocals
12:48 — The Invention and Adoption of Sunglasses
13:59 — Raymond Berry and His Goggles
16:19 — Reversing the stigma of glasses
17:22 — The importance of spectacles