I’m fascinated by spectacles because I’m a consumer of the product. I’ve worn them from a young age and they’re an indelible part of who I am. I’ve always liked them. My dad wore glasses too, and I remember for family photos he’d take them off whereas I’d put mine on. What amazes me is that although over two in three need spectacles, very few people know the story of them.
The business of spectacles comes from the Enlightenment. Sir Isaac Newton was looking at refraction of light in the late 1600s. In 1704 he wrote a book called Opticks when he was living on Jermyn Street, London, and that paved the way for different industries including the invention of microscopes and telescopes, and the optical lens industry was another child of that moment. The industry blossomed, with key proponents including Edward Scarlett, who made the first frames in 1727, and John Dollond, who was the son of a Huguenot silk weaver who moved to Spitalfields from France during the persecution. He joined the Spitalfields Mathematical Society, who used to meet in a pub, get pissed on mead and talk about numbers. He made the world’s first achromatic lens and set up the first opticians – Dollond & Aitchison – turning spectacles from a matter of pure science into a consumer proposition.
In 1750, when the first opticians were set up, life was pretty shit. Life expectancy was 38. Glasses were seen as academic, scholarly and scientific, and they were extremely expensive, though in the early 19th century they expanded from scientific to affluent communities – and the materials used changed accordingly. Glasses were originally made from steel but that extended to rolled gold, tortoiseshell and horn. In came the lorgnette, invented in 1785 by George Adams, for wealthy ladies to whip out at the theatre.
The early 1900s were the golden age of optics. Glasses could be produced more cheaply and the cost came down but they were still the preserve of relative affluence. Your glasses would be the most expensive thing you owned and your most treasured possession. As a consequence, there was an industry of repair. Timpsons shoe repair used to mend spectacles alongside shoes.
The seismic moment was in 1948 when the National Health Service was established. One of its key pillars was taking spectacles to the masses. They went from being the preserve of people who could go to Clerkenwell to spend a small fortune on spectacles to being given to anyone who needed them, for free, by the state.
That scheme was unprecedented: nothing had been attempted like that before in the world. Sight is still a major problem – more than 2 billion people worldwide don’t have access to glasses.
It also had a huge impact on the industry. At the start of the second world war there were 200-300 different workshops across Britain making bespoke and small-run stuff. The NHS offered seven shapes of frames, and 5m frames a year. The workshops that got the NHS contacts thrived and everything else shut or combined. By 1986, when the NHS stopped offering free glasses to all, there were three companies which had the NHS contracts knocking out these stock agreed frames. Two of these three went out of the business. The third – called The Algha Works – managed to survive. They went back to traditional premium materials such as rolled gold. At their peak they employed 500 people; now they employ seven.
This has all left us with a peculiar relationship with glasses. British standards in optics are still stringent. We have dispensing opticians; if you wander the streets of Paris you see beautiful little shops that sell glasses; whereas in Japan you put your head in a machine which uses autorefractors and prints your prescription off. But the NHS scheme meant that glasses became seen as a medical device and the frames weren’t designed to look nice but to find the smallest number of frames that could fit the maximum number of heads. So spectacles became derided. When I was at school the stigma associated with them was huge. They were a sign you didn’t have money or style.
I grew up in Leicester and I was exposed to a new world when I came across the brand Cutler & Gross. When I started working and received my first pay cheque I got a pair of their frames sent up from London. It was a big deal and there was an unveiling at the opticians.
The more you find out about the history of British optics, the more you realise how incredible it is. Spectacles touch on so many things – they enable your vision, they’re about manufacturing, design, phrenology, optics, materiality. The story is intoxicating.
Tom Broughton is the founder of Cubitts spectacle makers
