How did humans see before glasses (spectacles) were invented?!
Question: A random question I know, but I couldn't find my glasses this morning and it struck me that I would be very very lost without them.
Answers: A random question I know, but I couldn't find my glasses this morning and it struck me that I would be very very lost without them.
Contrary to popular belief they had very poor eyesight. With no artificial lighting their eyes would be straining almost constantly. For example, if a person wanted to read or do embroidery during or after dusk then all they would have was a candle (if they could afford one in the first place and could read). Try lighting a candle when it's dark while trying to read and you'll see how they strained their eyes.
To remedy the problem the wealthy could buy 'glasses' made of things like emeralds and other precious stones (e.g. some Roman emperors did) but the poor who often had to work in the dark or poorly lit places would have to make do with failing eyesight.
With difficulty.
They wouldnt have seen a dinosaur coming to eat them so would be an easy meal lol
They probably had a real hard time surviving.
it is believed that vision used to be much better than what we have now, the U.S. tends to measure vision on a 20/20 basis while most countries measure it on a 15/15 basis, the reason for this is that our eyes don't get the exercise they used to get, we are in artificial lighting most the time and we don't move around as much... so our eyes aren't exercising or adjusting like they were meant to do
Badly
Most people don't need glasses until they get older. We -all- need them when we get into our 40s, when we get presbyopia.
I'm guessing in the old days people born with serious sight defects were given some work to do that didn't require great vision. Literacy rates weren't very high anyway. And hardly anyone lived long enough to get presbyopia, so that wasn't a problem.
If you think about it, though, the development of spectacles for people who had trouble seeing led to the development of microscopes and telescopes, which helped us learn more and more about our environment, our world, and our universe! So it helped more than just people who needed glasses to see!
Actually, the environment in ancient times were alot better than now and you can almost say nothing makes them have poor eyesight. We have computers these days and most of us have to work on it for long hours which if we don't take a rest every hour, will affect our eyesight. Same goes to tv, and reading in improper lighting, etc etc. Since nothing was really invented yet, then their eyesight shouldn't be that bad to require glasses. I think.. Haha...
Most people didn't live long enough i.e after 40 to have a problem with sight, and the real problems with sight usually occur slightly later in life, unless you suffer from a degenerative sight disease. And glasses have been around for hundreds of years, depends on how long ago you are talking.
That's a good one!
You'd have thought - if Darwin was right - that we'd all have great eyesight now as the dodgy, poor eyesight leaving you vulnerable idea would have been eliminated, either by predators or by tribe members thinking you a burden and killing you themselves.
The emperor nero use to shape a piece of...shoot i forget the material....but anyway he used to shape a small piece of some sort of material to help him with his short sightedness.
Check out the "brief history of spectacles" ezine at stingyspecs.com.au- make sure you look at the one with pictures, not just the text, but this will answer your question- something about reading stones or polished glass were early vision aides, anyway this ezine takes you right through the ages really quickly.
They tried to see around them in diffrent ways
I may be wrong but I'm guessing that maybe before glasses were invented, humans had sharper senses.
I think that a long time ago, humans used their senses more than we actually do now.
Now that we have technology, we don't rely on our senses as much as we did before.
In the 14 Century, cataracts were removed by the shoe maker because he had nimble fingers.
It took him 90 seconds check it out.