The Lens – a great invention
Media
Part of Panorama
- Title
- The Lens – a great invention
- Creator
- Meyer, Jerome S.
- Language
- English
- Year
- 1960
- Subject
- Lenses.
- Bent glass.
- Rights
-
- Fulltext
- THE LENS— a great invention by Jerome S. Meyer Hundreds of millions of lives have been saved by curved glass. Hundreds of millions of eyes have been helped toward better vision, and countless millions of peo ple have been entertained through the use of curved glass which enables them to read books, magazines, newspapers, movies, and television. With out this curved glass, otherwise known as the lens, there could be no microscope, and the sciences of optics and bacterio logy which have wiped out the epidemics and plagues of years ago, would be unknown. Photo graphy would also be unknown and millions of us would be cheated out of proper vision. Navigation would be affected adversely without the lens; so would surveying and mapping and modem building since all engineers’ transits contain tele scopes. As important as the lens is, nobody knows who ac tually invented it. Spectacles were worn for nearly a hundred years before the microscope and telescope were born. Salvani D. Armato, an Italian, and Nicholas Bullet, a French priest are credited for being the inventors of curved glass spectacles as early as 1282. Anton Van Leeuvenhoek, the inventor of the microscope had designed 419 lenses, most of which were double convex type, which is the kind used in pho tography and moving picture projection today. The science of optics was developed through the efforts of Christian Huygens who in vented new methods of grind ing and polishing lenses, the principle of which is used this day. Newton was the first to show that light is composed of many different colors and that when light is bent these colors ap pear in the form of a spec trum. He explained this in terms of waves, wave lengths and vibrations. December 1960 85 The thoughts and research■ es of these men enabled the scientists that followed to formulate new laws of optics based on the nature of light rays, and soon photographic lenses began to appear. In stead of one piece of double convex glass, these lenses con sisted of several pieces cement ed together in many different ways. There are six types of lenses; the piano convex, piano con cave, convexo concave, concavo convex, double concave and double convex. The double con vex lens is the one most fre quently used, since it is a mag nifying lens as well as project ing lens. Both the surfaces of a double convex lens are curved outward like the outside of a watch crystal or a section of the outside of a sphere. The double convex lens also reduces. This is otherwise known as a reducing glass and is used occasionally, together with lenses in the construction of optical instruments. ¥ ¥ ¥ Pink Snow? The snow that falls in the Arctic is white snow but Arctic snowbanks sometimes look pink because of microscopic plants. When you stand close to the snow bank the color isn’t noticeable, but at a dis tance of 100 feet or so the snow will seem to be pink and sometimes quite red. At times the re flected color or these snowbanks give the sky a pink tinge. ¥ 86 Panorama