However, some Chinese people thought that it was the Chinese people who first invented glasses 2,000 years ago. Glasses had emerged in the middle of Ming Dynasty. A famous people named Tian Yi Heng of Ming Dynasty had said in his famous book, 'Once read the article, one may feel blind, faint and tired, and then can not distinguish the details of the article. So, he or she used a white silk to tie the head at the back. It is the method to deal with the myopia in ancient times.
Since the 13th century when lens had been invented, it had been polished by crystal glass. At that time, Chinese people used natural crystal as well as artificial crystal to make the lens. With the development of individual handicraft, the material of lens had been developed from natural
crystals to the glass. Meanwhile, the uses of glasses were starting to promote and expanded to common people, and then, the production technology of glasses also had new developments.
In 1937, a kind of plastic glass named acrylic was invented by French. One merit of it was that it was hard to break, while, the demerit was that the clarity of this glass is poor. In 1954, en engineer of France Essilor Company had been inspired by material of cockpit, and then he invented a kind of resin lens. Since then, that kind of lens has become the king in the world of lens, which has been used till now.
With thousands of years' development, the optical industry has become a large industry with certain scale and certain producing capacity around the world, which has also become an integral part of the entire economy. And it has made enormous contributions to the development of glasses.