posted by admin on Jul 9

One size fits all  self-adjusting spectacles are helping the world to see!

Someone has invented a great way to help everyone find the right glasses by using the same pair of spectacles!  I don’t just mean they all use the same frames – I mean that they all buy the exact same style of glasses and they will all be able to see!

Basically you adjust them yourself from the standard model!

I know it sounds a bit odd, but it could revolutionise the way people live in developing countries across the globe!

More than a billion people worldwide need glasses – but there are just not enough opticians to go around.  We might have 1 on every corner, but in developing countries like sub-Saharan Africa, the ratio is more like 1 optometrist per 1 million people.

How can we expect people to work, farm or support their families if they can see past the end of their noses?  We can’t – and someone is trying their hardest to help them all!

Who Is The Inventor?
The determined scientist behind this revolution is the British inventor and (now) retired Oxford University professor Joshua Silver.

He is now the director of the Centre For Vision In The Developing World, and is trying to scale up his invention and distribution to spread his adjustable glasses to the billion or so desperate and struggling individuals across the globe.

He has great plans to achieve this by 2020 – the beautiful irony of it will make anyone smile!

So far he has distributed hundreds of thousands of pairs to some very grateful people – helping them to continue working – or to come out of forced retirement from jobs that rely on perfect vision like needlework and jewelry trades.

How Do They Work?
Basically, they are a basic pair of spectacles with a syringe and tube on each side which feeds into each lens (2 pieces of thick but pliable plastic). 

Each ‘eye’ has it’s own syringe of silicon gel that can be fed into the gap between the lens until it has distorted their shape enough to correct their vision.  So rather than cutting and shaping glass to get the right curvature – the pressure of the gel does it there and then.

If you over-correct, you just retract the gel again and start over. 

Each eye can be adjusted as many times as you want until the best focus is attained for the wearers’ purpose – either close up for threading needles or more distant for driving. 

Once the perfect ‘prescription’ has been agreed – they can be set like this permanently by screwing in the stopper and then removing the tubing and syringes to make them look ‘normal’.

The Results:
We take eye care for granted and don’t think what a devastating effect it can have on an individual or a community.  Even if we lose our sight, there is technology that we can rely on and employment isn’t usually affected.

However, in the case of a villager in India or a farmer in Africa, this could mean the end of their working life completely.  How can a weaver work if they become too long-sighted?  How can a taxi-driver stay safe if they become too short-sighted?

And the thought of the head of a farming family or a mother of 6 young children without vision doesn’t bear thinking about!

Thank goodness Professor Silver isn’t selling out his invention to a large company – otherwise there could be a price tag on these glasses that puts them out of reach for thousands of people again…..