Contact Lens

A contact lens is a thin corrective, cosmetic or therapeutic lens placed directly on the surface of the eye, used by well over a hundred million people worldwide to correct vision without the frame of a pair of glasses. The German ophthalmologist Adolf Gaston Eugen Fick built the first functional contact lens prototype in 1888, a heavy scleral lens blown from glass that covered the whole visible eye surface, and the technology remained cumbersome until the Czech chemists Otto Wichterle and Drahoslav Lim developed the first soft hydrogel contact lens material in 1959. Soft lenses made daily wear practical and comfortable for a mass market, and contact lenses have since grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry serving both vision correction and cosmetic eye-color change.