History of Contact Lenses
Scholars of ophthalmology attributed the first description of a device that could be likened to a contact lens to Leonardo da Vinci, an Italian polymath, inventor, anatomist and scientist. The great Florentine master appended to the margin of a drawing in one of his writings discussing an optical system consisting of a hemisphere of glass filled with water and superimposed on a face with it. The relevance of this schema with respect to contact lenses is derived from the fact that the eyes are in contact with water, and it is believed that in one of the great master of Renaissance’s painting was a very small lens-like glass sphera used today.
The French philosopher René Descartes who was a writer, mathematician and a scientist as well contributed to the science of optical design with his idea of a glass cone filled with water through which one could see through from the terminal end of the eye toward the base of the cone which had a glass lid set at its base in the exact shape of the cornea.

In The History and Development of Contact Lenses, José Luis Roiz Muno Enrique of Salvador Aramendía explain that this proposal was reviewed and refined by the French mathematician Philippe of Hire (1640-1718) in 1685, who suggested using a concave glass on the eyeball and made an extremely important break–through suggesting that the internal curvature of the glass that would be placed directly over the eye should be as close to the natural curvature of the cornea, thereby eliminating the refraction of the cornea from the previously flat end of the cone.
Later, in 1827 Sir John Herschel, an English Astronomer postulated that it might be possible to create a mold of the wearers corneas and eye to enable a custom fit for the eye, allowing ti to conform to the eye’s curvature. This idea was put to the test by F. Muller, a German glassblower who in 1887 made an attempt to create the first known glass contact lens. In the late 1800s, Parisian Optician Edouard Kalt managed to correct a patient’s nearsightedness making ti the first successful contact lens, even though it could only be tolerated for a limited period of time owing to the wearers eyes going dry.