Q&A
Sep 03, 2020
3 minutes
ILLUSTRATION BY GLEN MCBETH
When did people start wearing glasses?
Various ancient peoples knew of the magnifying properties of lenses. There’s fragmentary evidence that the ancient Egyptians may have used them, while the Roman emperor Nero improved his view of gladiatorial games by watching them through an emerald.
By AD 1000, the Persian scholar Ibn Sahl had written a famous treatise on optics. In it he described “reading stones” – made of quartz or
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