No one thought that they invented it. The characters were using what was already very popular slang for years at that point. But only for a few years. The 19th century uses are similar but the usage in the 1980s developed separately.
FWIW, I remember seeing a TV documentary that showed a functioning odometer the ancient Chinese used, which according to the show allowed them to measure long distances very precisely. Sorry, no cite, this is from memory.
BRABANTIO: Thou art a villain!
IAGO: You are – a senator!
One of the rare punch lines in Shakespeare that lands better than on the day it was written. (Brabantio is a senator of the Republic of Venice, which actually had 'em.)
Like the line in “No Time at All” from Pippin: “Sages tweet that age is sweet…”
I would have thought their popularity dated even earlier, considering a gross of green spectacles are a plot point in The Vicar of Wakefield (1766).
I wasn’t aware of that. But you find a spike in reports of green sunglasses in the early 19th century
A lot of great false anachronisms so far!
RE: green sunglasses in the early 19th century, I got to wondering if they were tinted using arsenic, as so many other everyday items like clothing and book covers were colored green using an arsenic solution in that time period.
But no, apparently not, at least according to Google’s AI:
In the early 19th century, green-tinted spectacles were created by adding metallic oxides (such as iron or copper) directly into the molten glass mixture during manufacturing, or by using naturally colored mineral glass.
Samuel Pepys, a century prior:
I do truly find that I have overwrought my eyes, so that now they are become weak and apt to be tired, and all excess of light makes them sore, so that now to the candlelight I am forced to sit by, adding, the snow upon the ground all day, my eyes are very bad, and will be worse if not helped, so my Lord Bruncker do advise as a certain cure to use greene spectacles, which I will do.
I didn’t say that green spectacles didn’t exist earlier, but that there was an increase in their popularity and use in the early 19th century.
Nor am I the only one saying this:
In an essay called “The Optics of Green Spectacles” in the fall 2011 issue of The Edgar Allan Poe Review, Hiroko Washizu called attention to this trend in Poe’s written works, as well as the works of his contemporaries. Poe’s detective, C. Auguste Dupin, wears green spectacles in “The Purloined Letter” (1844) and in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842), using them to hide the movements of his eyes (and his dozing). In “Bon-Bon (The Bargain Lost)” (1832), the devil wears green spectacles, using them to cover the blank spaces where his eyes should be. Further, Poe supposedly wrote (in an anonymous article attributed to him) that green spectacles were an abomination.
Poe was not alone in describing green-spectacle-clad characters. Nathaniel Hawthorne made note of it on numerous occasions. In the novel Fanshawe (1828), he observed that the highest class of scholars wore them, but noted in his American Notebooks (1835–53) that the bumpkin did too, trying to imitate the habits of the elite. In A Wonder Book (1851), he states that one character wears them “less for the protection of his eyes than for the dignity that they imparted to his countenance.”
(That’s from a piece I wrote about the topic, in which I find that I DID cite “The Vicar of Wakefield”)
There’s also this:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/217239227/antique-c-1815-1840-brass-green-glass
Charles Dickens, in The Pickwick Papers (1836), describes a “studious-looking” man wearing green spectacles, just as Hawthorne does. Beau Brummell, that one-man avant-garde of British fashion, was described as wearing green spectacles in a novel published in 1844, shortly after his death. In Washington Irving’s “The Devil and Tom Walker” (1824), Walker wears green spectacles. The Class-Book of Anatomy (1837), by Jerome Smith, derides “the ridiculous mania” of wearing green spectacles, “which boys of a certain class seem to imagine adds wonderfully to the dignity of their appearance,” and condemns them as injurious to good vision. There are a great many other references to them by now-forgotten authors, in both fiction and non-fiction, from the first half of the 19th century.
It is a polymer. All plastics are polymers, but not all polymers are plastics.
Were the green specs just a refinement of the green visors worn by bookkeepers and scribes.
See also the scene in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon where Ben Franklin takes the stage for a glass harmonica performance wearing “lenses of a curious shade of aquamarine, allowing his eyes to be view’d.”
My intent there was simply an earlier datapoint for @hogarth. 
Charles Dickens used ‘fly’ in the sense of “sharp, smart” in Bleak House
Which also has characters named Michael Jackson and Prince.
Yeah, but that was a short term on off, until much later, it was not like coin-operated vending machines became popular or common after that.
The difference is between Popular (or Popularized) vs first used.
Like “Wendy” for a name- it occurred before Peter Pan, but it was unusual. After that- much more common.
The point is that someone writing a historically accurate work of fiction about 1st Century CE Greece or Hero of Alexandria might be loathe to make any mention of a coin-operated vending machine, since it would seem to be an anachronism, even though it’s not. This is the ‘Tiffany Effect’.
I also enjoyed his episode about the research he did about Tiffany that didn’t make it into the ‘Tiffany’ episode.
Sure- for holy water, and the machine is very simple. But after that period, they went away. Romans were not getting Garum from a vending machine. 
Something I posted a couple of years ago fits pretty well here
j