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A scleral lens was accidentally lathed in two, The Tuohy lens served as the basis for ongoing design leaving a smaller corneal button. Tuohy tried the changes to PMMA lenses that dominated the market | damaged lens on himself to see what would happen. After prior to the introduction of soft contact lenses. The first more experimentation, he filed his patent and published a and most important change was made by George fitting manual for the new lenses. Butterfield, who added peripheral curves to the posterior 1948Kevin Tuohy patents first corneal contact lens (made of PMMA)Contact lens sales quadruple.surface in 1950, introducing the modern concept of fitting the lens on the Ks.1 During the 1950s and 1960s, corneal PMMA lenses—made by Obrig Laboratories, Breger-Mueller-Welt in Chicago, and the Plastic Contact Lens Co (Wesley-Jessen), among others—also became thinner and smaller.Unfortunately, PMMA, like glass, is impermeable to oxygen. The resulting corneal oxygen deprivation caused many problems for contact lens wearers that researchers would spend decades more trying to address.[ NEWTON K. WESLEY, O.D., F.A.A.O. (B. 1917) ]Newton K. Wesley, O.D., is often credited with developing the first commercially successful rigid contact lens, in the mid-1950s. His lens, building on what Tuohy and Butterfield had done, was a 9.2-diameter lens, fit on theflattest K. “It’s interesting that, all these years later, 9.2 is still the best diameter,” said Frank Fontana, O.D., one of the founders of the AOA Contact Lens Section.But his greatest contribution to the field of contact lenses may have been in his teaching skills. Dr. Wesley and a former student of his, George Jessen, O.D., together started the Plastic Contact Lens Company, later to be called Wesley Jessen VisionCare, Inc., a leading manufacturer of specialty contact lenses, including toric, colored and opaque cosmetic lenses. Wesley Jessen was eventually acquired by CIBA Vision in 2001. “Wesley and Jessen taught all of us how to fit contact lenses,” Dr. Fontana said. “They almost single-handedly developed the market for contact lenses, just by traveling around the country educating people.” At the time, contact lens fitting was still a new field, and many thought contact lenses were unsafe; but Dr. Wesley and Dr. Jessen believed wholeheartedly in them. They continued to develop new lenses for decades, achievingFDA approval of their own hydrogel soft contact lenses6 | in 1978.In 1955, Dr. Wesley founded the National Eye Research Foundation, best known for its orthokeratology and keratoconus work, and remained its chairman for1950George Butterfield introduces modern concept of fitting the lens on the Ks.many years.
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