 |
Around
the year 1752, eyeglass designer James Ayscough introduced
his spectacles with double-hinged side pieces. The lenses
were made of tinted glass as well as clear. Ayscough felt
that white glass created an offensive glaring light, that
was bad to the eyes. He advised the use of green and blue
glasses. Ayscough glasses were the first sunglass like eyeglasses,
but they were not made to shield the eyes from the sun,
they corrected for vision problems.
In
1929, Sam Foster sold the first pair of Foster Grants (sunglasses)
at the Woolworth on the Atlantic City Boardwalk. Foster
started the Foster Grant Company in 1919.
Sunglasses
became popular in the 1930s.
Edwin
H. Land invented a cellophane-like polarizing filter (patented
in 1929), the first modern filters to polarize light. Polarizing
celluloid became the critical element in polarizing sunglass
lenses, it is a process that reduces light glare. In 1932,
Land along with Harvard physics instructor, George Wheelwright
III, founded the Land-Wheelwright Laboratories in Boston,
where Land developed and began (in 1936) to use numerous
types of Polaroid material in sunglasses and other optical
devices. In 1937, Land founded the Polaroid Corporation
and began to use his filters in Polaroid sunglasses, glare-free
automobile headlights and stereoscopic (3-D) photography.
Land is best known for his invention and marketing of instant
photography. |
 |
