Name an item that is both a medical device and a fashion accessory. Have you figured it out? This episode, and the episode next week also, are about the economics of the eyeglass industry. Does that sound boring? What we learned while making these episodes is that the eyewear industry is fascinating, and strange: what you see is often not what you get. In the U. They are the result of a merger between the French lens manufacturer Essilor and the Italian frame maker Luxottica.
But EssilorLuxottica goes way, way beyond luxury. They even own EyeMed, the second-biggest vision insurer in the U. So, you get the picture.
Let me say right up front that EssilorLuxottica would not speak with us for this series. But other people did: industry analysts and rival manufacturers; optometrists and economists, historians and a government regulator, who had this to say:.
But it seems that that knowledge did not result in any device for correcting vision until about the year For example, in an ancient society where you have slavery, if you cannot read, a literate slave will read to you. If you are insufficiently sighted to work in the fields, they will give you a sedentary activity instead, using your hands perhaps to spin or to make pots. Handley says the first vision-correcting device was called a reading stone. If you have a page on the table, you lay it flat and you place the reading stone on top of it, and your eye is at some distance from it, but it is performing that enlarging function.
In the late 13th century, friars and priests in Italy began to wear primitive spectacles that sat on the nose.
