Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (37 page)

Cohn valiantly advocated better lighting and seating for the schools. He studied typography to find medically optimal fonts and type sizes and even considered requiring tinted schoolbook paper. In fact, many such design reforms were adopted,
but in vain. High rates of correctable myopia persisted despite school hygiene programs. Cultural conservatives responded by turning from environmental to hereditary explanations. By 1896, even Cohn had shifted his interest from educational reform to mass testing that would let the German navy identify the part of the German population with unspoiled vision, the better to deploy them in the
marine artillery.
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In England and the United States, the school crusade against myopia was less strident and anxiety less pronounced. The growing proportion of eyeglass wearers was seen increasingly as a sign of technological progress rather than of physiological degeneracy. In 1893, the president of the ophthalmological section of the British Medical Association declared approvingly at the
society’s annual meeting that with the progress of popular enlightenment and civilization, in the world of the future “a man who goes about with his eyes naked will be so rare that the sight of him will almost
raise a blush.” Reporting this speech in the
Atlantic Monthly
, Ernest Hart summed up educated opinion of the time, that research had shown that very few people have ever had perfect vision
and that the prevalence of glasses reflected the progress of scientific diagnoses and treatments since the 1870s. There was no shame in improving the eyes technologically.
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Hart’s report signaled a growing voice against what he called the “croakers of decadence.” For the first time since the golden age of Spain, men (though not yet women) were beginning to flaunt their eyewear
as manifestations of the latest in science. The growing number of schoolchildren and young adults wearing glasses had provoked popular scorn as well as elite alarm; the earliest taunts of “four-eyes” and “four-eyed” date both in England and the United States from the 1860s and 1870s. Even the overworked youth of Germany had a similar and still less flattering expression,
Brillenschlange
, literally
“eyeglass-snake,” referring to the pattern on a cobra’s hood.
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A new generation of assertive myopes did not take such taunts passively. There was a growing sense that eyeglass wearing was not just a scientific correction but an extension and expression of the personality. In 1880, for example, a writer in the London
Saturday Review
remarked that “no artificial adjuncts of the human body are
so apparently identical with its nature as spectacles,” and that he knew those who could use them to smile, frown, sneer, and even eat. One such person of the day was Theodore Roosevelt, who went to the Dakota Territory as a (gentleman) cowboy to fortify and demonstrate his manliness and succeeded beyond all expectation. And no deed from that time of his life became more celebrated than knocking out
an armed ruffian who had used the dread slur “four-eyes.” (“As I rose,” TR later wrote proudly, “I struck quick and hard with my right just to one side of the point of his jaw, hitting with my left as I straightened out, and then again with my right.…”) During the Spanish-American War he further turned stigma into asset by leading the charge of his company of Rough Riders up San Juan Hill wearing
his signature pince-nez, now immortalized on Mount Rushmore.
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In fact, pince-nez, with two lenses mounted on the wearer’s nose and held there with a spring or other pressure system, had already become a wildly fashionable accessory. The same
Saturday Review
correspondent
noted their popularity and marveled at the transformation they produced in the wearer of temple eyeglasses: “You hardly recognize
your friend. The face looks but half-clothed, and it wears a rollicking expression which is in strong contrast with the sobriety of its old spectacled days.” It hardly mattered that the spring pressure and weight left indentations on the sides of the nose, that pince-nez were nearly always uncomfortable and easily broken, and that many ophthalmologists and opticians denounced them for their
failure to maintain a consistent and proper distance from the pupils. By the turn of the twentieth century, whole Harvard and Vassar classes were sporting pince-nez. Snobbery was part of their appeal; they imparted a superior, “quizzing” gaze like the lorgnette before them, and became a double-barreled monocle. With their black ribbon, ostensibly for protection of the optics, but often for dramatic
gestures, pince-nez almost encouraged theatricality. Arthur Conan Doyle knew a great clue when he saw one. (Perhaps because of this perceived arrogance, both military officers and civilian employers in the nineteenth century often required subordinates to address them or even to work without their glasses, even if their actual performance suffered.)
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The pince-nez, kept in place by spring pressure alone, was the first eyewear to become a fad among both men and women. Many ophthalmologists and opticians considered it difficult to fit, and the glasses fell off repeatedly. Yet as this patent specification observes, contemporaries thought the design avoided the “elderly appearance” of spectacles with temples. The inventor believed he had found
a better way to make the pince-nez stay put
.

Pince-nez soon had bolder competition. In 1913 the Kansas City
Star
detected “an age glorying in infirmity” and noted “owl-like round lenses the size of twin motor lamps” in “bulky tortoise shell and imitation celluloid.” New materials were at last beginning to expand both performance and expression, if only in helping revive the look of a traditional
frame material that had fallen out of favor. In the 1920s and 1930s new materials attracted a generation of celebrities who discovered that big, round glasses could appear youthful and daring: Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and the (alas, only almost) timeless George Burns. Le Corbusier made the common headlamp spectacles into geometric icons of modernity, and postmodernity. In
Précisions
(1930)
he declared the hallmark of the new man of worth to lie “not in the ostrich plumes in his hat, but in his gaze.” Seeming not only to gather but to project information, they have remained favorites of Philip Johnson and I. M. Pei. Female fashion authorities like Diana Vreeland and Carrie Donovan found the look equally appealing.
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Metallic spectacles and pince-nez remained the choice of many of
the Versailles generation: Woodrow Wilson, Georges Clemenceau, and especially David Lloyd George. If oversized hard-rubber, celluloid, or plastic spectacles enlarged the eyes of the wearer and exposed him or her to an admiring countergaze, pince-nez continued to connote an earlier, medieval theory of vision: eyes that emit piercing, searching rays, private eyes
that bore into public spaces. The
pince-nez thus remained favorites of the twentieth century’s own grand inquisitors, Heinrich Himmler and Lavrenti Beria, and of Beria’s most celebrated victim, Leon Trotsky. The metal frame also was the choice of the macho myope in the Roosevelt mode. The writer Isaac Babel, hoping to transcend his identity as a Jew “with spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart,” outdid even TR when he rode
with the anti-Semitic Cossack cavalry in the Russian civil war. Franklin Roosevelt’s lifelong use of pince-nez reflected his youthful admiration of the cousin who initially was thought to overshadow the better-looking Franklin in vitality. And like the other technologies we have studied, they changed FDR’s body language early in life, in his case leading him to tilt his head back and literally
look down his nose as he spoke to people. It later became Roosevelt’s genius to turn this affectation into a token of optimism rather than condescension. (Hitler, on the other hand, resisted the public display of eyeglasses, having speeches and documents prepared with special large-character typewriters.)
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World War II was a turning point in the optical modification of the
human body. Armies could not afford to exclude soldiers with correctable eyesight, and many Depression-era recruits were properly examined and fitted for the first time in their lives, raising public expectations of visual acuity. In postwar England the spectacle benefit became a symbolic feature of the National Health Insurance system at least until the Thatcher era, and even in fragmented U.S.
health care, vision plans remain popular in corporate benefits programs. Once a mark of otherness and later in some quarters of degeneration, eyeglass wearing became the acceptable and even prestigious condition of the majority. Today, six out of ten Americans and Britons wear lenses of some kind.
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The postwar relationship of the body and personality to vision aids has taken two directions:
expression and invisibility. Thermoset plastics (unlike the rigid Bakelite that prevailed in the interwar years) gave free reign to fantasy and to experimentation with new designs that could complement every facial shape. Women’s eyewear, long stigmatized, was first to make this leap. As usual, the pioneer came from outside the industry mainstream. A New York artist and window display designer, Altina
Schinasi Miranda, bored by the women’s glasses she saw displayed in the city, devised a new pointed look that appealed to Clare Boothe Luce and other
stylish and prominent women. Demand exploded in the 1950s, and the fashion press discovered that glasses could be flattering and even sexy. Ever since, celebrities and authorities have turned both men’s and women’s glasses into a quasi-cosmetic art
of matching frames with faces and clothing styles. Finding the correct historic spectacle or a suitable futuristic one is a recognized skill of Hollywood production designers— think of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s contoured sunglasses in
Terminator
— and characters’ eyewear is often reborn as production models to meet demand. The tradition of flamboyant glasses continues with Elton John and Barry Humphries.
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In popular as well as celebrity culture, glasses have been revalued. In the technological boom of the 1990s, plastic-rimmed taped glasses were praised for their “nerd chic.” At midcentury, the spectacles of Piggy in William Golding’s
Lord of the Flies
(1954) have the vital power to start fires, yet Piggy himself is a born victim. In J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter book series (beginning in 1997),
a bullied child instead becomes the protagonist, and Harry Potter—style round glasses have been revived for fans.

Glasses are for protection as well as reading, in large part as a positive unintended consequence of military research in the 1940s. Early plastic lenses made of polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA), a material marketed under the trademarks Perspex, Plexiglas, and Lucite, scratched easily.
But during World War II, the sheets of glass in some U.S. bombers were held together by a bonding compound called CR-39, developed by Pittsburgh Plate Glass, to reduce weight and increase the planes’ range. An optical researcher, Dr. Robert Graham, was able to experiment with CR-39 after the war and developed technology to turn the difficult, sticky raw materials into lenses. Meanwhile, the U.S.
government was mandating higher breakage-resistance standards that added to the weight of optical glass, while chemists in the late 1970s developed long-sought scratch-resistant coatings for plastic. The result was that CR-39 became the preferred material and captured most of the lens market by the 1980s. Glass became a premium material because of the extra step needed to bring it to safety standards.
(Graham later used his fortune to establish a eugenically inspired fertility program called the Repository for Germinal Choice, instantly dubbed the Nobel Sperm Bank by the press.) The search for protection did not end with CR-39; polycarbonate, a more expensive material with superior impact resistance, has since become the standard for sports protection. Many factories mandate polycarbonate
safety glasses for employees whether or not they need vision correction: hard hats for the eyes.
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Military aviation also helped create the modern sunglass industry. Tinted glasses had existed in China, and in the West at least since the Renaissance—a group of friars in
Don Quixote
are wearing them on their travels—but were developed scientifically only in the twentieth century. Bausch & Lomb
originally produced Ray-Ban green goggle lenses in the 1920s for U.S. Army aviators troubled by glare reflected from clouds. During the Depression, when plastic sunglasses cost only a quarter, Bausch & Lomb put the new glass into plastic frames and began selling them under the trademark Ray-Ban. In place of the nineteenth century’s optimistic valuation of the sun, postwar research substituted far
more sobering warnings about ultraviolet light, which have made sun protection almost as important in outdoor eyewear as shatter resistance.
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Meanwhile, a second trend was growing. Instead of supplying optics as externally mounted protection for the eyes, it aimed to augment or even reshape the surface of the eye. Like the improvements in worker seating that we have observed, this work originated
in wartime necessity. An English ophthalmologist, Harold Ridley, operating on Royal Air Force fighter pilots injured in battle, discovered that their eyes had not rejected the slivers of PMMA from the cockpit hood. He wondered whether this plastic could replace the lenses removed from elderly patients when cataracts, areas of hard and cloudy dead cells, had grown excessively. Since cataracts
are one of the world’s leading causes of blindness, and conventional cataract surgery required patients to use special thick glasses afterward, Ridley risked his reputation and incurred the scorn of most of his British colleagues to develop a new operation, the intraocular lens transplant. Since the first procedure in 1949, 200 million people worldwide have received artificial lenses. Meanwhile,
new plastics developed from the 1930s to the present have made possible a technology proposed three hundred years earlier by René Descartes, the contact lens. For the first time, laypeople were applying medical devices to the surfaces of their own eyes, and the eyeball lost something of its sacred character. Optometrists, long separated from MDs in part by their lack of training in physical contact
with the eye, now began to cross a psychological boundary.
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