Credited to Italy. Pisa and Venice both have claims. Giordano da Pisa's 1306 sermon and the Pisan convent chronicle point to Pisa or its Tuscan surroundings, while Venice has the earliest evidence of organized manufacture, from 1300 to 1301. Historians favor Pisa but do not regard it as certain. Both cities are in present-day Italy.
How it began
The earliest spectacles are generally agreed to have been invented in northern Italy in the 13th century. On 23 February 1306 the Dominican preacher Giordano da Pisa said in a sermon in Florence that the art of making them had been discovered less than twenty years earlier, and that he had seen and spoken to the man who first did it. Historians including Edward Rosen and Vincent Ilardi therefore date the invention to about 1286. The inventor's name is unknown.
Before it existed
Lenses were already known before spectacles existed. The new step was to take two lenses and join them so that they could be held before both eyes. The earliest form was two mounted lenses riveted together at the handle ends, with no sides, clamped on the nose or held in place by hand.
How it works
Rivet spectacles held convex lenses, which corrected the long-sightedness that comes with age. They suited the few people who lived past their forties and could read. The wearer had to stay fairly still or support the frame with a hand. By the 16th century lenses could correct both long and short sight.
How it spread
The chronicle of the convent of Santa Caterina in Pisa records that Friar Alessandro della Spina, who died in 1313, worked out how to make spectacles after the first maker refused to share the method, and that he shared it freely. Venice regulated spectacles as merchandise in 1300 to 1301. They were painted on the noses of scholars by 1352, and before the end of the 14th century they were being imported into London by the thousand.
What lasted
Over centuries the rivet spectacle was refined into nose spectacles, the pince-nez and the framed glasses worn by millions of people today. The College of Optometrists describes the history of spectacles as hundreds of years of innovation that began with the 13th-century Italian design.
