This online exhibition is the result of several decades of research carried out by museum staff and supporters. The text has been subject to detailed peer review and is constantly revised to reflect the latest scholarship. We believe this is the most reliable history of spectacles available on the web.
Generations of people have become used to living with snow and have adapted their clothing to cope. Although no longer 'politically correct', the term 'Eskimo Goggles' is a recognised eyewear classification term for collectors and does not relate specifically to any one snow-covered area of the globe nor any longer to any one ethnic group.
The term 'reading glasses' meant something rather different from what it does today.
The inter-war National Health Insurance Scheme, other charitable schemes and spectacles subsidised by friendly societies.
Quite apart from the origin of spectacles in the monastic scriptoria of Western Europe, there have been times since when the design of spectacles has had to take into account religious sensitivities.
