the good doctor on: The Father of the Soft Contact Lens
Blog Vol. II , 26, The Father of the Soft Contact Lens
Every day the Google browser has a picture for the day. This was today’s.
When I saw this come up, I knew what this week’s blog would be about.
On October 27th, 1913, Otto Wichterle was born in Protejov, Moravia. He studied chemistry in Czechoslovakia and graduated from the Czech Technical University in 1936. He went to the Bata’s Institute, where he began working with polymers. During the Second World War he was imprisoned by the Gestapo for a few months and after the war he returned to his studies in organic chemistry. Otto became the dean of the Institute of Chemical Technology in Prague. It was there that he and Drahoslav Lim developed a cross-linking gel called pHEMA (Poly[2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate]). They patented the material in 1953. Otto was at first unsuccessful in shaping the polymer using molds. In 1958 the Communists, through a political purge, forced Otto and others to leave the Institute, so it wasn’t until late 1961 that the first soft contact lens was successfully developed.
Otto used a home-made apparatus, using a children’s building kit (Merkur), which is pictured in the Google image above. He hooked up a bicycle dynamo which belonged to one of his sons and a bell transformer. So, on Christmas Day, 1961 Otto and his wife, on their kitchen table, for the first time were able to centrifugally spin the polymer into a lens, thus inventing the spin-casting method of lens fabrication. His earliest experimental lenses were first called Geltakt and were later named after it’s manufacturer the Spofalens. In 1965 the Bausch and Lomb Company of Rochester, New York, started making spun-cast lenses for the American market.
The lens was so successful, even I had an opportunity to fit spun-cast lenses in the form of the U3 and U4 lenses, in the late 80’s and early 90’s. We have come a ways with newer materials, like silicon hydrogels and more advanced molding procedures, but the first advancements in soft contact lens wear was due to the ingenious work of Otto Wichterle.
Happy Birthday Otto!
Til next week,
the good doctor, Dr. Mark Germain, Burlington Optometrist
