Believe it or not, the concept of contact lenses appeared as an idea as early as 1508, and the father of that idea was no less and no more than Leonardo da Vinci.
Da Vinci once described a method in which the power of vision would be improved by immersing the head under water or by carrying some kind of glass hemisphere filled with water. However, this proved to be an extremely impractical idea, like many of Da Vinci's inventions (say, the helicopter) because of the age in which he lived, when such an invention could not even be imagined, let alone realized.
Over the years, many have tried to make contact lenses, until 1887. In Germany, the glassblower F. E. Muller made the first eye wrap, through which em could be seen, em blinked! A year later, in 1888, Adolf Fick, a German ophthalmologist who worked on Muller's inventions, made the first contact lens from blown glass. He is actually considered the inventor of contact lenses because he was the first to patent this invention - under his own name. Although uncomfortable to the eye, and adapted for short-term wear of only a few hours because it covered the whole eye, including the whites of the eyes, it was considered a revolutionary discovery.
In 1930, when Plexiglas was discovered, Louis Gerard Heine, a professor of ophthalmology at the Texas School of Medicine, advanced the invention by making the lens lighter and more comfortable to wear and contributing to the development of contact lenses as we wear them today.
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