How it began
In the summer of 1952 the Czech chemist Otto Wichterle sat on a train from Olomouc to Prague beside a man reading an ophthalmology magazine. He proposed using lightly cross-linked, water-swellable polymers for eye implants, filed a patent, and listed contact lenses among possible uses. He developed a gel called poly-HEMA that held about 40 percent water and was transparent. In late April 1957 he put a molded gel lens on his own eye. On Christmas afternoon 1961, at home in Prague, he cast the first four lenses with regular edges in open rotating molds.
Before it existed
Contact lenses of the time were hard. Wichterle's first attempts used closed polystyrene molds, which left irregular edges and tore the gel when the molds were opened. The lens he tried in 1957 irritated his eye at the edges, though a few minutes of wear were enough to show him that soft gel lenses could correct vision.
How it works
The lens is made of a hydrophilic polymer gel that swells with water and stays soft and clear. Wichterle shaped it by spin casting: liquid monomer hardens inside an open mold while the mold rotates. His first machine used glass molds, a children's building kit and the generator from his son's bicycle. A version with 15 spindles followed by New Year's Eve, driven by a motor from his gramophone. In the first four months of 1962 he and his wife produced 5,500 lenses.
How it spread
In 1964 Martin Pollack and Jerry Feldman of the National Patent Development Corporation in the United States licensed the technology and sublicensed it to companies in the United States and Europe. In 1966 they concluded an agreement with Bausch and Lomb, which had never made contact lenses before. In March 1971 the Food and Drug Administration approved the lenses for sale, and the company's share price rose from 47 to 150 dollars almost overnight.
Who pushed back
In 1958 research on hydrogel lenses at the university in Prague was halted and Wichterle was expelled. He continued the work at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, where he was placed in the Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry. The machine that produced the 1961 lenses was built at home, not in a laboratory.
What lasted
Wichterle, who died in 1998, was remembered that year at a symposium in Prague as the father of the soft contact lens. A tribute in Contact Lens Spectrum noted that the chemistry of the first HEMA lens changed little in 30 years. Silicone hydrogel lenses, introduced around the time of his death, kept the comfort of his design and added much greater oxygen transmission.
