Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things

by Charles Panati

  Eye Drops: 3000 B.C., China

  Because of the eye’s extreme sensitivity, eye solutions have always been formulated with the greatest care. One of the earliest recorded eye drops, made from an extract of the mahuang plant, was prepared in China five thousand years ago. Today ophthalmologists know that the active ingredient was ephedrine hydrochloride, which is still used to treat minor eye irritations, especially eyes swollen by allergic reactions.

  Early physicians were quick to discover that the only acceptable solvent for eye solutions and compounds was boiled and cooled sterile water. And an added pinch of boric acid powder, a mild antibacterial agent, made the basis of many early remedies for a host of eye infections.

  The field of ophthalmology, and the pharmacology of sterile eye solutions, experienced a boom in the mid-1800s. In Germany, Hermann von Helm-holtz published a landmark volume, Handbook of Physiological Optics, which debunked many antiquated theories on how the eye functioned. His investigations on eye physiology led him to invent the ophthalmoscope, for examining the eye’s interior, and the ophthalmometer, for measuring the eye’s ability to accommodate to varying distances. By the 1890s, eye care had never been better.

  In America at that time, a new addition to the home medicine chest was about to be born. In 1890, Otis Hall, a Spokane, Washington, banker, developed a problem with his vision. He was examining a horse’s broken shoe when the animal’s tail struck him in the right eye, lacerating the cornea. In a matter of days, a painful ulcer developed, and Hall sought treatment from two ophthalmologists, doctors James and George McFatrich, brothers.

  Part of Otis Hall’s therapy involved regular use of an eye solution, containing muriate of berberine, formulated by the brothers. His recovery was so rapid and complete that he felt other people suffering eye ailments should be able to benefit from the preparation. Hall and the McFatriches formed a company to mass-produce one of the first safe and effective commercial eye drop solutions. They brand-named their muriate of berberine by combining the first and last syllables of the chemical name: Murine.

  Since then, numerous eye products have entered the medicine chest to combat “tired eyes,” “dryness,” and “redness.” They all contain buffering agents to keep them close to the natural acidity and salinity of human tears. Indeed, some over-the-counter contact lens solutions are labeled “artificial tears.” The saltiness of tears was apparent to even early physicians, who realized that the human eye required, and benefited from, low concentrations of salt. Ophthalmologists like to point out that perhaps the most straightforward evidence for the marine origin of the human species is reflected in this need for the surface of the eye to be continually bathed in salt water.

  Dr. Scholl’s Foot Products: 1904, Chicago

  It seems fitting that one of America’s premier inventors of corn, callus, and bunion pads began his career as a shoemaker. Even as a teenager on his parents’ Midwestern dairy farm, William Scholl exhibited a fascination with shoes and foot care.

  Born in 1882, one of thirteen children, young William spent hours stitching shoes for his large family, employing a sturdy waxed thread of his own design. He demonstrated such skill and ingenuity as the family’s personal cobbler that at age sixteen his parents apprenticed him to a local shoemaker. A year later, he moved to Chicago to work at his trade. It was there, fitting and selling shoes, that William Scholl first realized the extent of the bunions, corns, and fallen arches that plagued his customers. Feet were neglected by their owners, he concluded, and neither physicians nor shoemakers were doing anything about it.

  Scholl undertook the task himself.

  Employed as a shoe salesman during the day, he worked his way through the Chicago Medical School’s night course. The year he received his medical degree, 1904, the twenty-two-year-old physician patented his first arch support, “Foot-Eazer.” The shoe insert’s popularity would eventually launch an industry in foot care products.

  Convinced that a knowledge of proper foot care was essential to selling his support pads, Scholl established a podiatric correspondence course for shoe store clerks. Then he assembled a staff of consultants, who crisscrossed the country delivering medical and public lectures on proper foot maintenance.

  Scholl preached that bad feet were common across the country because only one American in fifty walked properly. He recommended walking two miles a day, with “head up, chest out, toes straight forward,” and he advised wearing two pairs of shoes a day, so each pair could dry out. To further promote foot consciousness, he published the physician-oriented The Human Foot: Anatomy, Deformities, and Treatment (1915) and a more general guide, Dictionary of the Foot (1916).

  Scholl’s personal credo— “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise” —certainly paid off handsomely for him in the long run. But in the early days, his advertising, featuring naked feet, prompted many complaints about the indecency of displaying publicly feet clad only in bunion pads or perched atop arch supports.

  Scholl created a national surge in foot consciousness in 1916 by sponsoring the Cinderella Foot Contest. The search for the most perfect female feet in America sent tens of thousands of women to their local shoe stores. Competing feet were scrutinized, measured, and footprinted by a device designed by Scholl. A panel of foot specialists selected Cinderella, and her prize-winning footprint was published in many of the country’s leading newspapers and magazines. As Scholl had hoped, thousands of American women compared their own imperfect feet with the national ideal and rushed out to buy his products. Across the country, in pharmacies, department stores, and five-and-ten-cent stores, the yellow-and-blue Dr. Scholl’s packages became part of the American scene.

  William Scholl died in 1968, at age eighty-six. He maintained till the end, as he had throughout his life, that while other people boasted of never forgetting a face, he never forgot a foot.

  Laxatives: 2500 B.C., Near East

  “Preoccupation with the bowel,” a medical panel recently reported, “seems to be the concern of a significant proportion of our population.” The physicians based their assessment on the number of prescription and over-the-counter laxatives consumed by Americans each year, generating profits of a half billion dollars annually.

  But concern for proper bowel function is not new. The history of pharmacology shows that ancient peoples were equally concerned with daily and regular bowel behavior. And early physicians concocted a variety of medications to release what nature would not.

  The earliest recorded cathartic, popular throughout Mesopotamia and along the Nile, was the yellowish oil extracted from the castor bean. Castor oil served not only as a laxative, but also as a skin-softening lotion and as a construction lubricant for sliding giant stone blocks over wooden rollers.

  By 1500 B.C., the Assyrians’ knowledge of laxatives was extensive. They were familiar with “bulk-forming” laxatives such as bran; “saline” laxatives, which contain sodium and draw water into the bowel; and “stimulant” laxatives, which act on the intestinal wall to promote the peristaltic waves of muscular contraction that result in defecation. These are the three major forms of modern laxative preparations.

  Archaeologists believe that there is good reason why people throughout history have displayed somewhat of an obsession with bowel functioning. Prior to 7000 B.C., man was nomadic, a hunter-gatherer, existing primarily on a diet of fibrous roots, grains, and berries. A high-fiber diet. This had been his ancestors’ menu for tens of thousands of years. It was the only diet the human stomach experienced, and that the stomach and intestines were experienced in handling.

  Then man settled down to farming. Living off the meat of his cattle and their milk, he shocked the human bowel with a high-fat, lower-fiber diet. Ever since, people have been troubled by irregular bowel function and sought remedying cathartics. Perhaps only today, with the emphasis on high-fiber foods, is the human bowel beginning to relax.

  In the intervening millennia, physicians worked hard to find a variety of l
axatives, and to mix them with honey, sugar, and citrus rinds to make them more palatable. One druggist, in 1905, hit upon the idea of combining a laxative with chocolate, and he caught the attention of the American market.

  In his native Hungary, Max Kiss was a practicing pharmacist, familiar with a chemical, phenolphthalein, that local wine merchants were adding to their products. The practice was at first thought to be innocuous. But soon the merchants, and the wine-drinking public, discovered that a night’s overindulgence in wine created more than a hangover in the morning.

  The chemical additive turned out to be an effective laxative. And when Max Kiss emigrated to New York in 1905, he began combining phenolphthalein with chocolate as a commercial laxative. He initially named the product Bo-Bo, a name inadvisably close to the slang expression for the laxative’s target. Kiss reconsidered and came up with Ex-Lax, his contraction for “Excellent Laxative.”

  The chocolate-tasting product was a welcomed improvement over such standard cathartics as castor oil. Especially with children. Production of the laxative candy eventually rose to 530 million doses a year, making the preparation an integral part of the early-twentieth-century American medicine chest.

  Eyeglasses: 13th Century, Italy

  Ancient peoples must have needed eyeglasses to aid their vision at some point in life, but the invention did not appear until the close of the thirteenth century. Until that time, those unfortunate people born with defective eyesight, and the aged, had no hope of being able to read or to conduct work that demanded clear vision.

  The inventor of spectacles most likely resided in the Italian town of Pisa during the 1280s. He is believed to have been a glass craftsman. Although his exact identity has never been conclusively established, two men, Alessandro Spina and Salvino Armato, coevals and gaffers—glass blowers—are the most likely candidates for the honor.

  The evidence slightly favors Salvino Armato. An optical physicist originally from Florence, the thirty-five-year-old Armato is known to have impaired his vision around 1280 while performing light-refraction experiments. He turned to glassmaking in an effort to improve his sight, and he is thought to have devised thick, curved correcting lenses.

  History records two early references to eyeglasses in Armato’s day. In 1289, an Italian writer, Sandro di Popozo, published Treatise on the Conduct of the Family. In it, he states that eyeglasses “have recently been invented for the benefit of poor aged people whose sight has become weak.” Then he makes it clear that he had the good fortune to be an early eyeglass wearer: “I am so debilitated by age that without them I would no longer be able to read or write.” Popozo never mentions the inventor by name.

  The second reference was made by an Italian friar, Giordano di Rivalto. He preached a sermon in Florence on a Wednesday morning in February 1306, which was recorded and preserved: “It is not yet twenty years since there was found the art of making eye-glasses, one of the best arts and most necessary that the world has.” The friar then discussed the inventor, but without mentioning his name, concluding only with the remark, “I have seen the man who first invented and created it, and I have talked to him.”

  Concave and Convex Lenses. Whoever the inventor of eyeglasses was, the evidence is unequivocal that the innovation caught on quickly. By the time Friar Giordano mentioned spectacles in his sermon, craftsmen in Venice, the center of Europe’s glass industry, were busily turning out the new “disks for the eyes.” The lenses in these early glasses were convex, aiding only farsighted individuals; amazingly, more than a hundred years would pass before concave lenses would be ground to improve vision for the nearsighted.

  Eyeglass technology traveled to England. By 1326, spectacles were available for scholars, nobility, and the clergy. Glasses were not ground individually; rather, a person peered through the various lenses stocked in a craftsman’s shop, selecting those that best improved vision. Physicians had not yet endorsed glasses, and there were still no calibrating procedures such as eye charts and eye testing.

  In the mid-fourteenth century, Italians began to call glass eye disks “lentils.” This was because of their resemblance in shape to the popular Italian legume the lentil, which is circular, with biconvex surfaces. The Italian for “lentils” is lenticchie, and for more than two hundred years eyeglasses were known as “glass lentils.” Not surprisingly, “lentil” is the origin of our word “lens.”

  One early problem with eyeglasses was how to keep them on, for rigid arms looping over the ears were not invented until the eighteenth century. Many people resorted to leather straps tied behind the head; others devised small circles of cord that fitted over each ear; still others simply allowed the spectacles to slide down the nose until they came to rest at the most bulbous embankment.

  Leonardo da Vinci, designer of the first contact lens; metal-framed spectacles for reading; the lentil bush, whose small biconvex seeds inspired the word “lens.”

  Spectacles with concave lenses to correct for myopia were first made in the fifteenth century. Because they corrected for poor distance vision, in an era when most eyeglasses were used for reading, they were deemed less essential for pursuits of the mind and consequently were rarer and more costly than convex lenses.

  Cost, though, was no concern of the recklessly extravagant Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, second son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, who in 1513 became Pope Leo X. Though at times the severely nearsighted cardinal was so desperate for money that he pawned palace furniture and silver, he purchased several pairs of concave-lens eyeglasses to improve his marksmanship in hunting game and fowl. Four years after he became pope, he sat for a portrait by Raphael that became the first depiction in art of concave correcting lenses.

  Despite the many drawbacks of early eyeglasses, they had a profound effect on people from seamstresses to scholars, extending working life into old age. And with the arrival of the printing press, and the wealth of books and newspapers it spawned, eyeglasses began the transition from one of life’s luxuries to one of its necessities.

  Modern Frames and Bifocals. The first “temple” spectacles with rigid sides were manufactured by a London optician, Edward Scarlett, in 1727. They were hailed by one French publication as “lorgnettes that let one breathe,” since the anchoring side arms made breathing and moving about possible without fear of the glasses falling off the nose.

  Starting in the 1760s, Benjamin Franklin experimented with designing bifocal lenses, so that on trips he could glance up from reading to enjoy the scenery. But bifocals would not come into common use until the 1820s, freeing people who needed both reading and distance lenses from alternating two pairs of glasses.

  Whereas eyeglasses were something of a status symbol in the centuries in which they were rare and costly, by the nineteenth century, when glasses were relatively inexpensive and commonplace, wearing them became decidedly unfashionable. Particularly for women. Glasses were worn in private, and only when absolutely necessary were they used in public.

  Today we take for granted that eyeglasses are lightweight, but one of their early drawbacks was their heaviness. Temple spectacles sculpted of bone, real tortoiseshell, or ivory rested so firmly on the ears and the bridge of the nose that corrected vision could be impaired by headaches. And the burden was significantly increased by the pure glass lenses the frames supported. Even temple spectacles of lightweight wire frames contained heavy glass lenses. It was only with the advent of plastic lenses and frames in this century that eyeglasses could be worn throughout the day without periodic removal to rest the ears and nose.

  Sunglasses: Pre-15th Century, China

  Smoke tinting was the first means of darkening eyeglasses, and the technology was developed in China prior to 1430. These darkened lenses were not vision-corrected, nor were they initially intended to reduce solar glare. They served another purpose.

  For centuries, Chinese judges had routinely worn smoke-colored quartz lenses to conceal their eye expressions in court. A judge’s evaluation of evidence as cred
ible or mendacious was to remain secret until a trial’s conclusion. Smoke-tinted lenses came to serve also as sunglasses, but that was never their primary function. And around 1430, when vision-correcting eyeglasses were introduced into China from Italy, they, too, were darkened, though mainly for judicial use.

  The popularity of sunglasses is really a twentieth-century phenomenon. And in America, the military, which played a role in the development of sunscreens, also was at the forefront of sunglass technology.

  In the 1930s, the Army Air Corps commissioned the optical firm of Bausch & Lomb to produce a highly effective spectacle that would protect pilots from the dangers of high-altitude glare. Company physicists and opticians perfected a special dark-green tint that absorbed light in the yellow band of the spectrum. They also designed a slightly drooping frame perimeter to maximally shield an aviator’s eyes, which repeatedly glanced downward toward a plane’s instrument panel. Fliers were issued the glasses at no charge, and the public soon was able to purchase the model that banned the sun’s rays as Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses.

  What helped make sunglasses chic was a clever 1960s’ advertising campaign by the comb and glass firm of Foster Grant.

  Woodcut of a sixteenth-century book collector in corrective spectacles; smoked lenses, the earliest sunglasses.

  Bent on increasing its share of the sunglass market, the company decided to emphasize glamour. It introduced the “Sunglasses of the Stars” campaign, featuring the sunglassed faces of such Hollywood celebrities as Peter Sellers, Elke Sommer, and Anita Ekberg. Magazine advertisements and television commercials teased: “Isn’t that…behind those Foster Grants?” Soon any star in sunglasses, whatever the actual brand, was assumed to be wearing Foster Grants.

  Well-known fashion designers, as well as Hollywood stars, escalated the sunglass craze in the ’70s with their brand-name lines. A giant industry developed where only a few decades earlier none existed. As women since ancient times had hidden seductively behind an expanded fan or a dipped parasol, modern women—and men—discovered an allure in wearing sunglasses, irrespective of solar glare.