If you’re interested in eyewear and/or love quirky museums, this is the place for you! The venue is small but densely packed!
I only wish I’d discovered it earlier!
The videos are also worth watching - most are short, no more than a few minutes, and most are old (pre-1980s).
ADDRESS: 42 Craven Street, London, WC2N 5NG, UK (a few minutes’ walk from Trafalgar Square in Central London)
British Optical Association Museum (The College of Optometrists) - London, UK
This is the oldest known donation to the British Optical Association: spectacles dating from 1850s that were sent from India to the UK in 1909.
The BOA today has over 30,000 items and actively seeks out new acquisitions.
Although it’s generally accepted that spectacles originated in Venice, Florence or Pisa in the late 13th century, most examples from that period have been discovered in Germany, the Low Countries and nothern Europe.
This is a replica of a book dated 1403 with glasses inside the cover! A great idea for the scatterbrained among us!
The earliest glasses sat on the nose - they didn’t usually stay in place so had to be held there.
This is an example dated 1550-1650, the oldest glasses in the museum’s collection.
Glasses with temples (colloquailly called the “arms” or “sides”) are more familiar to us today. They were invented in the 1720s.
This is one of the earliest pairs, a design named after Edward Scarlett Senior, who ran “The Old Spectacle Shop” in Soho and was appointed optician to King George II in 1727. I’m not sure what in particular makes the design Scarlett-type. Perhaps the spiralled round ends of the temples, which are visible in the glasses on the right (the oldest pair has personalised covers - presumably for comfort and for better hold).
Did you know? The first binoculars were for indoor use, specifically opera glasses. These examples from the late Georgian and Edwardian periods are quite stunning. Apart from getting a better view of the stage, opera glasses were apparently used just as much for spying viewing other audience members and for dignitaries in the boxes.
Quizzing glasses (or simply quizzers), consisting of a single handheld lens, were popular from the early 18th century. In the Victorian era, they were sometimes worn on chains around the neck. Their popularity declined from 1850.
This was a refreshing piece of levity!
It’s an allusion to the feeble excuse put forward by Dominic Cummings – at the time, senior advisor to Prime Minister Boris Johnson – for breaking COVID-19 lockdown restrictions. More in this short video (1m10s) on the BBC.
I think most of us are familiar with Ishihara’s plates for testing for different types colour blindness (more properly called colour vision deficiences given that there are many different types and black-and-white vision is very rare).
This colour blindness test, developed by a certain Professor Holmgren, used different coloured wool skeins*. The subject was given skeins of three colours and had to find the closest match for each from the hundred of colours available.
* A lovely word, don’t you agree? (Dictionary definition)
Imagine wearing one of these contact lenses! Ouch!
Optometrists have a zany sense of humour!
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