Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (36 page)

The rise of scientific optics did not transform
spectacles into an everyday technology of the body for most Europeans and North Americans in the late seventeenth or eighteenth century. Like armchairs and keyboard instruments, high-quality eyeglasses remained luxury goods, made by skilled artisans for limited markets. Kepler’s idea of a curved lens was developed by a Russian theorist in the early eighteenth century, but the design was not widely
available until well into the nineteenth. Cheap German spectacles were available in England for as little as fourpence, but optics were crude and frames were cheaply plated. Good glasses, framed in steel or precious metals, cost at least a shilling, and in North America far more.
¹⁹

Despite the price, there was still no standard for dispensing glasses and no scientific equipment for refracting
eyes; buyers usually had to try on multiple pairs. The eighteenth century did make one important contribution to the regular wearing of glasses: in the 1720s, English opticians introduced temple spectacles with solid side pieces swinging out on hinges, and sometimes double-hinged for greater compactness. This new design was soon recognized as the best way to keep the lenses properly positioned on
the face and remains the standard. Those who could afford effective glasses bought and used them. But outside Spain, vision aids were still slightly embarrassing acknowledgments of infirmity. George Washington, who owned a double-hinged pair, was said to have excused himself when using them in public, explaining that “I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.” The
many eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century spectacles on display at the New-York Historical Society with hinged or sliding temples appear as substantial optical instruments, not as fashion. The temples often terminate in circles of a diameter of two or three centimeters, which pressed against the side of the head.
²⁰

Despite the expense and awkwardness, attitudes were changing. A few
politicians were even proud of their vision aids. The Society owns paintings of both Patrick Henry and Aaron Burr wearing glasses, though pushed up on their foreheads. The association of glasses with education must have appealed to both, yet neither felt comfortable with glasses as part of the permanent record of his face. That step was, of course, taken by Benjamin
Franklin, who really did cement
halves of concave and convex lenses together in one frame to create the first bifocals and avoid the need for switching between reading and distance glasses. And a few other scientists, inventors, and artists also did not hide their use of glasses. In old age Jean-Baptiste Chardin painted himself wearing a tortoiseshell pair. But it was American scientist-artist siblings who showed the nascent
acceptance of vision aids most strikingly. In 1801, the painter Rembrandt Peale depicted his brother, the young botanist Rubens Peale, with the still rare geranium that Rubens had grown from seed for the first time in America. Rembrandt showed Rubens’s glasses in his hand. But family and friends believed that because Rubens wore the glasses constantly for his extreme farsightedness, they should
be on his head, so Rembrandt added a second pair masterfully to his brother’s forehead.
²¹

Rubens Peale, for whom glasses had opened a new world, was a pioneer of new attitudes. Over the 1800s, eyeglasses were transformed. At the beginning of the century they were heavy and costly, or light and almost worthless. By its end, they were stunning examples of the high technology
of their day, precision instruments available at least to the lower middle class and the better-off working class. They brought together some of the most advanced chemistry, physics, and medicine of their era, creating new industries and professions. And as in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the technology of printing and the skills of reading reinforced each other. Reading built the
demand for vision aids, and high-quality glasses helped expand the reading public. We have seen that many medical authorities welcomed infant formula as a superior alternative to human breast milk, and that countless households began to prefer the performance of a celebrated artist, fixed on a player piano roll, to homemade music. Magazine editors considering submissions started to favor the crude
typography of a bar striking through an inked cotton ribbon over the most elegant and legible handwriting. So the eyes were brought into a debate over the future relationship between the human senses and technology. Was the increasing human symbiosis with the mechanical world a source of pride or of alarm? Spectacles, more than any other invention, started and stimulated the debate. If musical and
textual keyboards established standard ways to record and transmit information, optics transformed the way Western humanity gathered and absorbed it.

We have already seen how many innovations come from people at the margins of a technology, applying techniques acquired in other contexts. The first true optical-grade glass was developed in 1790 by the Swiss watchmaker Pierre-Louis Guinand, who
later worked with the Munich physicist Josef Fraunhofer, himself originally an artisan. In manufacturing, the leader was neither a physician nor an optician but a minister in Rathenow near Berlin: Johann Heinrich August Duncker, an optical hobbyist and inventor with a strong background in physics and mathematics. His treatise on eyeglasses remained a standard work for decades. Duncker received a
royal patent for a machine capable of grinding eleven lenses precisely and simultaneously from one drive mechanism. A worldly philanthropist, he was angered by the damage caused by inferior glasses and also concerned about the fate of war victims. Employing disabled veterans and war widows, he provided free glasses for troops and poor children. Rathenow became one of the world’s first centers for
the large-scale production of precision goods; by the 1820s the city had two hundred factories, making it the world’s most advanced optical center. Duncker’s invention was said to have achieved for German optics what mechanical looms did for British textiles. So dominant did Germany become that the United States did not even produce optical glass in quantity until supplies were disrupted during World
War I.
²²

In the middle and late nineteenth century, university-trained scientists further transformed the optical industry and the dispensing of eyeglasses. In 1862, the Dutch ophthalmologist Herman Snellen developed the chart (with the E at the top) and the scale (with 20/20 as the norm) still in wide use today. In Germany, the chemist Otto Schott and the physicist Ernst Abbe made the Zeiss
works in Jena the world technical leaders by the end of the century. Meanwhile, the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz had founded the modern discipline of physiological optics and refined the ophthalmoscope, which permitted direct inspection of the retina and thus helped to establish ophthalmology as a medical specialty. Helmholtz also increased the prestige of optics by demystifying the human eye,
arguing powerfully that its imperfections show Darwinian adaptation rather than omnipotent design. Alone, the eye would be an unsatisfactory camera; as used by the mind, it had evolved into a superb instrument of understanding. Since we have been unconsciously manipulating its impressions all along, a reader would conclude, it is perfectly reasonable to improve them further with optics. To determine
just which corrections the eyes needed, Edison’s electric light made possible new generations of diagnostic equipment,
including refracting instruments that could test countless lens combinations for determining prescriptions.
²³

Never had science or technology changed the everyday appearance and behavior of ordinary people so strikingly as in the hundred years following
Duncker’s high-minded venture. The answer is not just in the new knowledge but in the demand that encouraged them. Mass literacy made vision aids a necessity for tens of millions of people. The governments of northern Europe and North America, especially in the middle and later years of the century, saw increasing economic and military value in extending fluency in reading and writing from the middle
class and the cities to the countryside, and later from boys to girls. New industrial processes and military weapons alike made written instructions important throughout the ranks. As we have seen in the history of the typewriter, women were beginning to dominate the clerical workforce.

Prussia, the birthplace of the modern eyeglass industry, led the world in establishing a rigorously controlled
school network. Matthew Arnold wrote in his 1866 report to the Schools Inquiry Commission that Germany’s educational system “in its completeness and carefulness is such as to excite the foreigner’s imagination,” and the German victory over France in 1871 was widely credited as much to the Prussian schoolmaster as to the drill sergeant. Prussian male illiteracy was already below 5 percent when
the war broke out, but France and England had almost closed the gap by 1900, when virtually everyone in northern and western Europe could read and write—one of the most impressive government programs in history, both the cause and effect of the explosion of inexpensive reading materials thanks to steam presses, wood-pulp paper, and national postal systems.
²⁴

In the nineteenth century, reading
appeared in a different light, no longer as the attribute of a clerical and administrative elite but as a mental skill indispensable to the new industrial world of complex equipment and printed manuals and regulations. Governments also needed literate populations to enforce policies and mobilize opinion, and manufacturers’ marketing depended on posters and advertisements. Reading was the mental technique
that was essential to the maintenance and operation of nineteenth-century technology.

The Victorians, now considered the staunchest apostles of progress, should have been ecstatic at the spread of reading and writing skills to the
masses. Many early-twenty-first-century academics and writers look to the late nineteenth as a golden age of print and educational reform. Of course, there had been
warnings against the perils of bookishness since antiquity and, as we have seen, in the Renaissance. Even in the early nineteenth century, in the golden age of German classicism, social critics warned of
Lesewut
, literally “reading mania.” The masses, it seems, just could not win; they were either illiterate or foolishly ambitious.
²⁵

By the 1860s, the old critique of the perils of print had new
support from an unexpected quarter, the medical profession itself. Physicians had long been concerned about the effects of reading on the bodies of schoolchildren; we have noted that health reformers were trying to improve classroom seating decades before corresponding innovations in factories and offices. By the 1870s, the new instruments for measuring vision were revealing an unexpected trend:
nearsighted children.

Not surprisingly, the first warning appeared in the land that contemporaries identified with educational standards, precision workmanship, and optics: Prussia. And the diagnostician was the leading ophthalmologist of Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland), Dr. Hermann Ludwig Cohn (1836— 1906). As a young man he published
An Investigation of the Eyes of 10,060 School Children
(1867),
the first major epidemiological study of vision, assailing the dim lighting and cramped seating of traditional schools. In his travels he examined the eyes of nomads like the Bedouins, of hunter-gatherers, and of the illiterate peasants of some of Germany’s remote areas. Their excellent distance vision impressed him, and he blamed the growing prevalence of myopia on the heavy reading loads and
detailed work of late-nineteenth-century education and industry.
²⁶

Thanks to Cohn’s influence, doctors from St. Petersburg and Tiflis to New York City and Cincinnati were testing schoolchildren for myopia and other conditions; in 1886 Cohn listed forty studies involving hundreds of schools, including Harvard. Evidence was overwhelming that the rate of myopia increased from grade to grade, suggesting
that additional reading was changing the shapes of students’ eyes permanently. In Cohn’s own studies, the proportion of nearsighted students rose from 5 percent in the countryside to fully half the graduating classes of the
Gymnasien
. Book learning was, it seemed, hazardous to visual acuity.
²⁷

Cohn’s warnings were hardly isolated. While the rest of Europe and North America were largely celebrating
the Reich’s secondary schools, Germany’s doctors, politicians, and parents deplored “overburdening,” which allegedly was leading to a soaring suicide rate and “nervous debility.” To
Cohn and his supporters, myopia was another manifestation of the physical and mental “diseases of civilization” brought on by crowded cities, pollution, business pressures, and lack of fresh air and exercise. The flood
of information seemed overwhelming. Literally and figuratively shortsighted, industrial humanity appeared to be walking into an evolutionary trap, as success in life paradoxically produced physical and mental infirmity.
²⁸

For all this agitation, there were equally noted physicians and critics who virtually welcomed the spread of myopia and of eyeglasses. Cohn was scandalized by his Dutch colleague
F. C. Donders, author of the international standard work on eye examinations. The higher degrees of myopia were serious, Donders admitted, but could be prevented with timely spectacle prescriptions; as for the milder forms, they “bring a capacity for delicate hand work and scientific investigation that we would not like to do without.” Donders wrote that he would not want to abolish mild myopia
even if he could, as it was a sensible accommodation of the eye to practical needs. It would not bother him if it turned out that the scholar and the peasant each developed the eye most suitable for his use. Another German expert flatly declared that education and skills demanded physical and mental sacrifices, and a third compared myopia to the military surrender of life for the Fatherland. Where
Cohn saw sickness and danger, and called Donders’s “delicate hand work” “generally superfluous,” many others found what they considered Darwinian adaptation.
²⁹