Adjustable Eyeglasses for the World’s Poor

By Patricia Daukantas

The eyeglasses that physicist Joshua Silver is wearing in this photograph look curiously like those worn by the fictional boy wizard Harry Potter. To the people who receive a pair of these glasses, they just might seem to be “magical.”

Silver, a physicist at Oxford University in England, has designed a pair of self-adjusting eyeglasses designed to help poor people in developing countries, especially rural areas. The Washington Post wrote an inspiring article about his work on January 10.

Silver’s glasses don’t require the services of an ophthalmologist, optometrist or optician. Instead, the lenses in each pair are made of a soft plastic sac that holds silicone oil. Eyeglass wearers can adjust the little pumps on the earpieces to add or subtract the clear oil until they see better.

So far, Silver has distributed about 30,000 pairs to the Third World, but he hopes to distribute 1 billion spectacles by 2020.