Funny holidays - International Bespectacled Day

March 4th is a funny holiday - International Bespectacled Day This term is quite often used to refer pejoratively to people who wear glasses In this particular case there is nothing wrong with it You could even say that this is a “professional” holiday for those who have poor eyesight, started wearing glasses and turned them into a stylish accessory, an important part of their image Is there at least one person who has never seen glasses? Two lenses in frames of different shapes, which are attached to the temples - the design of the glasses is considered universal and is unlikely to change in the near future Why reinvent the “bicycle”? Although a lot of alternatives to glasses (lenses, surgical vision correction) have appeared quite a long time ago, many still prefer them The history of glasses began many centuries ago According to one unconfirmed version, even before their invention, people with poor eyesight were forced to use special crystals, which were carefully polished beforehand It is difficult to say how much truth there is in these assumptions Both today and twenty centuries ago, people most often experience two vision problems - myopia and farsightedness The former have trouble seeing objects at a great distance, while the latter cannot get a good look at what is very close By the way, farsightedness was not as common as myopia For the first time, Aristotle spoke about the defect of vision, in which people did not see objects in the distance He gave this pathology an extremely unusual for that time, but absolutely correct explanation - the ancient Greek philosopher believed that the reason was the non-standard structure of human eyeballs He was absolutely right, since myopic people do have elongated eyeballs, as a result of which the retina is located behind the focal plane At first, myopia was very common, which was facilitated by working without normal lighting, poor living conditions, and lack of quality medicine Contrary to misconceptions, in Europe such people were valued They could do painstaking work - copying manuscripts, embroidering, knitting, working with small details When medicine reached a new level and normal electric lighting appeared, the number of myopic people decreased sharply, and by the end of the last century it increased again, since we had a lot of technical means that negatively affect vision (TVs, phones, computers) Disputes about the authorship of certain great inventions sometimes turn into real verbal battles, and this cup and glasses have not been spared According to one unconfirmed version, they were invented at the end of the 13th century in Italy This fact today can neither be refuted nor confirmed The only indirect evidence is the mention of a new invention in the sermon of the Dominican Giordano da Rivalto in 1305 At that time, glasses were already quite common The monk mentioned that less than twenty years had passed since their invention, but he managed to personally meet their creator Half a century later, a fresco appeared in the Italian church of Treviso, which for the first time depicted a man wearing glasses The name of their inventor was still not mentioned anywhere, although with a high degree of probability it can be argued that he was still Italian Much later, information about a certain Salvino Armati began to appear in various sources None of the researchers had a viable theory about the true inventor that could be documented, so this theory became widespread However, it was completely refuted by later critics No family with the surname Armati during the period in which "Salvino" supposedly lived had relatives with that name, as evidenced by family trees It was not possible to find the grave of this person, which was described in detail indicating the exact location Subsequently, a number of critics smashed this version to smithereens, and the inventor of the glasses remained unknown