Latest / The Hidden History Podcast
History of Spectacles
For most of human history, when your eyesight failed, your career was over. No workaround existed. Then, sometime around 1285 in a workshop in Pisa, someone figured it out — and immediately refused to tell anyone.
This episode traces the full story of spectacles: from the ancient Romans grinding crystal to magnify text, to the 11th-century Islamic scholar whose mathematical study of light made the whole invention theoretically possible, to the anonymous Italian craftsman who invented glasses and the Dominican friar who gave the secret away anyway.
It also traces the lie — a Florentine…
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