When Did Humans Start Wearing Eye Glasses? 5 Surprising Facts About Their History

Eyey glasses feel like such an everyday object that it's easy to assume they've always existed. They haven't. Throughout most of history, people just got on with living with it, whatever that was like for reading, working or ageing eyesight. 

However, humans started wearing glasses in the late 13th century, most likely in Italy. That makes them a little over many decades old. The full story behind that date is a lot stranger than most people realise. 

The History of Eye Glasses and When Did Humans Start Wearing It? 

eye glasses history

image credit: Google Gemini AI

The eyeglasses were among the most important innovations of the medieval period in history, affecting the way scholars read, craftsmen worked, and common people interacted with the written word. 

Glasses as we know them today developed slowly from early as simple magnifying tools used by people to look at things closer, through being made into a practical tool, to real glasses as a fashion accessory.

Here are five facts about the history of glasses that go beyond the usual textbook version.

1. Humans Started Wearing Eye Glasses in Late 13th-Century Italy

Most historians place the invention of wearable glasses in northern Italy, somewhere between 1268 and 1300, most likely in Pisa or Florence. Two convex lenses were mounted in frames made of wood, leather, bone, or horn, then balanced on the nose to help with reading, as per Glasses. Before this, people relied on handheld magnifying tools, which weren't practical for everyday use.

2. The "Inventor" of Glasses Everyone Cites Never Actually Existed

You may have read that a Florentine man named Salvino D'Armati invented glasses. He didn't, because he almost certainly never existed. The claim traces back to a supposed 1317 tombstone inscription, first mentioned in 1684 by an antiquarian who never actually produced any proof of it. Historians later found no record of anyone by that name living in Florence at the time, and a 19th-century memorial built in his honour was quietly removed once the hoax was exposed, according to Wikipedia. 

3. We Know Glasses Existed Because of a Sermon, Not a Surviving Pair

eye glasses

There's no surviving 13th-century pair of glasses to point to as "the first." Instead, historians rely on a 1306 sermon by Dominican friar Giordano da Pisa, who told his congregation, "it is not yet twenty years since there was found the art of making eyeglasses... I myself saw the man who discovered it", as per Medievalists. That single sentence is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for when glasses began.

4. Glasses Didn't Have Arms for Over 400 Years

For centuries, eye glasses simply balanced on the bridge of the nose or had to be held in place by hand, since there was no way to secure them to the head. It wasn't until the 1600s that Spanish craftsmen began attaching ribbons or string to loop over the ears, and rigid arms resting over the ears weren't invented until 1727 by British optician Edward Scarlett, as per Salus University.

5. Sunglasses Came Before Reading Glasses, Just Not for Vision Correction

Eye glasses, as they were known, were just placed on the nose or had to be supported by the hand. There was no means of fixing them to the head. According to Salus University, ribbon or string was first used by Spanish artisans to loop over the ears in the 1600s, while a stiff arm that rests over the ears didn't become possible until 1727, when Edward Scarlett, a British optician, invented it.

So in a strange way, humans covered their eyes with lenses before they ever used them to see more clearly.

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Conclusion

The story of when humans started wearing eye glasses isn't as tidy as most retellings suggest. There's no lone genius, no surviving first pair, and a memorial in Florence that spent over a century honouring someone who was never actually real. What we do have is a sermon, a handful of Italian craftsmen, and roughly 700 years of steady, unglamorous improvement.

thumbnail image credit: Google Gemini AI