There is much debate about who invented the concept of contact lenses but this is what we do know. Back in 1508 Leonardo da Vinci made sketches of a rough version of what a lens for the eye would look like. Then in 1632 Rene Descartes came up with the idea of a contact lens for the cornea.
In 1801, building upon Descartes’ earlier idea, a man named Thomas Young came up with a way to repair his own flawed vision using a glass tube filled with water and fashioned with a microscopic lens on the other end. Contact lenses were already beginning to take shape.
During the years 1887 and 1888 more progress was made with contact lenses. The first contact lenses to be made completely out of glass were invented by three men by the names of A. Eugen Fick, Edouard Kalt and August Muller. Although these lenses were a step in the right direction of progress, they tended to be anything but comfortable and corrected only a small amount of vision problems.
The development of contact lenses made a huge step in the vision correction field when a new plastic called polymethylmethacrylate (abbreviated PMMA) appeared on the market. Following close on the heels of this new plastic, was a man named Kevin Touhy who applied for, and was approved for a patent in 1948 to make the very first ever plastic contact lenses. These lenses proved a great deal more comfortable for contact lens wearers.
The inventor most widely credited with the pioneering of contact lenses however is a chemist from Czechoslovakia by the name of Otto Wichterle in the year 1961. His soft lenses continue to be the number one choice for contact lens wearers throughout the world.