I have to hold everything at arm's length now

I can read the letter fine. I just have to stand across the room from it. — Merchant, 1275

Around AD 100, Plutarch wrote that old men could read just fine as long as they held the book far enough away. It took another 1,200 years or so for somebody in Italy to put two lenses in a frame. In 1306 a friar told his congregation he'd met the man who made the first pair. He didn't mention his name. People had been writing things down for about 4,500 years by then.

Noted: the oldest known painting of glasses, from 1352, is still on a wall in Treviso, Italy. It shows a cardinal who died before they were invented.

The full file

For a couple hundred years Florence claimed the inventor, a man named Salvino degli Armati. There's still a monument to him in a church there. He was made up. A Florentine writer cooked up his epitaph in the 1600s to give the city the credit, and people believed it until the 1920s.

The real inventor kept his method to himself. A friar from Pisa, Alessandro della Spina, worked out how to make them on his own and gave the method away.

Those first glasses only helped people who couldn't see up close. A lens for the nearsighted turns up in Raphael's portrait of Pope Leo X, painted around 1517 to 1519, more than two centuries later. And in 1784 Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter describing his "double spectacles," for far and near both. He said they made his eyes as useful as ever. Lucky man.