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He was visual aids, some of which are still sold by Designs for dismayed to find that he Vision, an optical products company founded by Dr. could do nothing to help Feinbloom in 1961 and currently headed by his son, one of his very first Richard Feinbloom. patients, a severely visually Late in life, when Dr. Feinbloom developed macular impaired man. The young degeneration himself, he reportedly saw the silver lining | 3 optometrist began in his condition, noting that only now could he truly tinkering with spectacle- understand what his low-vision patients had mounted telescopes—the experienced. Like many pioneers, Dr. Feinbloom had a strong entrepreneurial spirit. In the 1930s, he developed the Feincone system for fitting scleral lenses and sold the trial lens sets to optometrists all over the country.“When I started practice in 1947, I tried to fit some patients with scleral lenses using this system and even wore them myself for a very short time,” remembers Robert Koetting, O.D., founder of The Koetting Associates, in St. Louis, Mo.[ G L A S S C O N T A C T L E N S E S : 1 5 0 0 T O 1 9 3 5In 1508, Leonardo da Vinci sketched out several ideas for neutralizing the cornea through contact with fluid. He understood that corneal power could be altered by submerging the eye in a glass bowl filled with water, for example. Essentially, he described the principles of a contact lens without describingsomething we would actually recognize as a contact lens.1 More than a century later, Rene Descartes described a glass tube filled with liquid and attached to the eye. This was hardly a contact lens; but again, the principle of corneal neutralization was clear.The first written description of a device approximating a contact lens is believed to date to 1823. Sir John Herschel, an English astronomer, proposed “some transparent animal jelly contained in a spherical capsule of glass applied to the surface of the eye” to correct irregular astigmatism.1 He also suggested that a mold of the cornea might be taken and impressed on sometransparent medium. He thought it possible that “a temporary distinct vision” might be obtained through4 | one of these methods, but it is not known whether Herschel ever tried to put his ideas into practicIn the late 1880s, at least three men are thought to have independently invented the first contact lenses. Adolph Eugen Fick, a Swiss ophthalmologist, and Eugene Kalt, a French ophthalmologist, devised glass lenses with the goal of correcting corneal abnormalities. Around the same time, August Müller, a German medical student who wanted to correct his own high myopia, also produced a glass lens.These first contact lenses were crude by modern standards, made of blown glass bubbles or ground and polished glass, and were primarily scleral designs that covered much of the eye. They were heavy and unwieldy and let no oxygen through to the cornea. Patients could tolerate the lenses only briefly andusually suffered from signs and symptoms of corneal hypoxia rather quickly. Nevertheless, the improvement in visual acuity that a piece of glass on the eye could provide was encouraging.Between 1890 and 1935, there were no developments of any great consequence. Two German companies, Karl Zeiss Optical Works and Mueller Co., as well as small labs in the U.S. and elsewhere, continued to make glass contact lenses but demand was very limited. According to the American Academy of Optometry, approximately 10,000 pairs of glass contact lenses were sold in the U.S. between 1935 and 1939.21936 1944William Feinbloom introduces contact lens made partially from plastic PMMA introduced in U.S. by Rohm and Haas Co.Dr. Borish publishes his classic textbook, Clinical Refraction.began making the soft contact lenses that were sold to Mr. Tuohy’s contact lens was a large, thick, flat lens Johnson & Johnson and eventually became known as the with blunt edges that would hardly be considered brand contact lenses. He even patented some revolutionary today.
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