I can’t walk around in my house without my specs…so had do the folks deal with poor vision before eyeglasses became readily available ?
There’s a chapter in my book about this.
There is some evidence of the use of lenses in the ancient world but not much. There’s the Nimrud or Layard ens, masde of rock crystal.A number of lenses were found in an ancient Roman place maufcturing cameos, and were thought to have been used to examine the work there. In fact, the existence of extremely fine cameos and other works of art has been held up as indirect evidence for the existence of lenses.
We do knowthat Seneca wrote about h use of glass balls filledwith water used as magnifying glasses by the elderly. Aristotle wrote about using tubes to correct fuzzy bvsion (more on this below).
Som,e people have suggersted that fine work was done by the very myopic.
My own suggestion s that people in the ancient world used pinholes.
The problem with lenses is that really large really clear sections of rock crystal or other gems were rare, making them expensive. Ancient glass of any thickn ess tended to have bubbles and inclusions in it, makin g it not very good for lenses (hence the Glass Balls Filled with Water – the thin glass wouldn’t cause much of a problem, and the water did the actual magnifying. You had to replace the water every now and then, though, when it got too full of algae and other crap.) Add to this that glass is fragile, fracturing easily, and you have a problem.
But pinholes are easy to manuifacure, using soft material like leather or parchment and a burin, or a relatively tough material like bone or shell or stone, drilled through with a pump drill (whicvh we know theyt had – there are plenty of beads of all sorts with holes in them).
You could make the pinhole in a paddle and use it as a lorgnette. Or you could put it in a round piece with a smooth edge and weart it like a monocle. If you lost or broke it, it would be asy to replace. (Aristoite’s “tubes” are just another version of pinholes, so we KNOW the principle had been established.)
Why don’t we know more about these, if this is the case? Because I suspect that most of these pinhole glasses haven’t been recognized for what they were. They might look like a disc with a ole in it, or a paddle with a hole in it, and that’s unremarkable. In my book, I identify some examples of possible proto-gasses.
There are a number of burials in Western China (wrongly ascribed to India in some online places) where the dead person wears a “mask” of metal pierced with a lt of holes where the eyes are. I don’t think these are specialty ornaments for the dead – they’re perfectly functioning multi-pinhole “glasses”, like the ones sold on later night TV. You can make a set yourself from cardboard and a pushpin, and see how well theyt function. In fact, several years ago a backpacking magazine suggested that hikers who lost or broke their glasses might use cardboard or duct tape with holes in them as a substitute until they got back.
Please note: This is NOT the same as Eskimo snow-goggles, which have much larger openings.
Also, one more advantage of these – by restricting the rays which can enter the eye, such pinhole “glasses” allow you to hold an object mucvh closer to your eye without it blurring too much to be seen. It thus gives you effective magnification without a lens. Would’ve been useful for all those cameo makers. Not to mention older folk with myopia trying to see if tht blur in the distance in uncle Sextus.
I hope your book had a good editor. 
Better than self-editing on this Board, at least.
Squinting helps a lot when you cannot find your glasses or did for me before I got Lasic surgery. I had worn glasses for half a century, and bifocals for 10 years, and hadn’t gotten used to the bifocals yet when the doc said maybe I should get trifocals. SO then we talked about the alternatives and surgery was the answer. I had it done in Medellin Colombia where I go for all serious medical stuff. Afterwards I could see individual leaves on trees from 20 feet away. I had never known that that was possible, and for the last 7 years I have been glad I did.
Would most people even realize they needed glasses?
It’s not like the average person had any reason to read, or really do anything of any detail. Wouldn’t to them, the blurry world just seem normal?
I’m nearsighted, but if I go without glasses a few days, I don’t really take notice of my blurry distance sight unless trying to watch TV.
Sometimes they just lived with poor vision. In the Torah, Leah, one of Jacob’s wives, has “weak eyes,” and that’s generally accepted as a way of expressing the fact that her vision was poor enough to require some adjustment-- maybe she couldn’t go out at night without a guide, or had some difficulty in strange places, but was by no means blind.
When most people weren’t literate, and there weren’t things like roadsigns to read everywhere, or even letters, it was easier just to accept.
If the OP didn’t have glasses she (or he) would learn her way around her apartment, and not bump into thing. She only has trouble when she doesn’t have her glasses, because she’s used to having them. If you’ve ever known a blind person, they don’t use canes or dogs around their own living space.
It’s likely that people back then had better eyes–because having good eyesight conferred more advantages than it does now, and was thus more selected for. Also, harmful practices that are common nowadays–like staring at a fixed distance for an extended period of time, like when watching TV or reading– were less common back then. And for what it’s worth, most people back then wouldn’t have noticed poor eyesight as easily as we can today.
And the ones with really poor eyesight, like me, would have been killed by predators/enslaved by invaders/fallen off cliffs etc far more easily, especially if their eyesight was poor at a young age.
Since very few people learned to read or went to school, their eyes did not deteriorate, and they retained excellent childhood vision into advanced age. The human eye did not evolve for the close work of reading, and that causes a strain which is very damaging to one’s eyes.
Birdwatching in the third world, I often encounter old men in the countryside who, in their 50s or 60s, can see and describe the field marks of birds in the distance almost as well as I can see them with binoculars.
Depending on era, some might’ve been et. Some would go into occupations that don’t need it as much (being a monk?). Or rely on your family’s charity. Or ride a sighted giant, Master Blaster style. At least that’s what I’d do.
OP: you can’t get around your home? Glasses help, and I might have some Mr. Magoo moments (“hello ma’am!” to my cat, then I realize that it’s a paper bag). But my other senses and knowledge of where things lie plus the blurry image makes it a lot easier than you might expect just based on vision. If you move the furniture just slightly, I’m not sure how many things I’d stub.
In a sense, yes. We adapt to the blur and many people who have minor or maybe moderate impairments might not know. But I can tell when I can’t read inch-tall text from arm’s length. Sounds like yours is not as bad, but yeah, you can being to think squinting all the time is normal.
Sounds like an anecdote. Using your vision for multiple distances while young is good for you. But that doesn’t mean that looking at close things is the primary cause of current vision in the population. I’m pretty sure that they were reading and watching TV 50-60 years ago.
Some people didn’t see very well. They lived their lives the best that they were able. They probably weren’t archers, but most jobs don’t require particularly good eyesight.
Isn’t that usually the answer to these sorts of questions?
Q. What did people do before they put iodine in salt?
A. Many of them got goiter
Q. People managed just fine before the measles vaccine was invented
A. Lots of people got measles, and a fair number of them died from it
People are capable of living under many less-than-ideal circumstances
“Hey kid! What is this little thingy here?”
Brilliant. Simply brilliant.
Oh, I bet you could. You wouldn’t like it, but you could do it, and you’d get used to it, and if you never knew any better it would be just another inconvenience just like some people have bad knees or a weak stomach.
Debunked how? Those are links to a bunch of studies on limited amounts of reading in poor light. They can hardly be extrapolated to the lifetime of reading, staring at electronic devices, and focusing on close-in work that separates us from the typical ancient Roman.
T. Sato asserts that there is no doubt that “school myopia” in increasing rapidly due to the spread of education and increase of near work.
Emmetropia (relaxed focus) occurrs at about six meters. For a wild animal or human prehistorical ancestors, this arrangement allows for alertness to predators or prey at a distance.
Your links only debunk the DIM LIGHT reading myth.
They bumped-into things and fell down a lot.
Samuel Pepys began to suffer from eyestrain in 1663 when he was 30. It was probably longsightedness combined with astigmatism, the latter untreatable then. He turned to the great spectacle maker John Turlington, who gave him the wholly wrong advice to use concave lenses rather than convex ones, and that reading glasses were the worst thing he could use. On the advice of Robert Boyle he consulted Dr Daubeny Turberville, the leading ophthalmologist of the day, but as Pepys himself noted, one who had never seen an eye dissected until 1668. He prescribed eyedrops, purges, pills and bleeding. Pepys’ eye problems lead him to abandon keeping his famous diary in the fear (unfounded, as it happened) that he was going blind. He resolved to dictate written matter to his office clerks, which meant he had to keep his private thoughts and feelings to himself and confine himself to official writings. They would have read out correspondence to him. A strong light would have helped him but candle light would never be good enough.