Otto Wichterle

Otto Wichterle (1913 to 1998) was a Czech chemist, born in Prostejov, Moravia, who invented the soft contact lens and the process used to make it. He earned his doctorate at the Prague Institute of Chemical Technology, where in the 1950s he worked on a material for eye implants, hydroxyethyl methacrylate, a transparent polymer gel that absorbs water. After being forced out of the institute in a political purge, he continued his work on hydrogels at home with his wife, a doctor. In 1961 he used a homemade device built from an old phonograph and an Erector set to develop a spin-casting process in which centrifugal force shapes the gel into soft, pliable lenses, and the couple made 5,500 lenses in five months. The lenses were more comfortable, cheaper, quicker to adjust to and wearable for longer than hard lenses, but he earned little because the Czech government owned the process rights, which it sold to an American optometrist and later to Bausch and Lomb.