Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity
Page 31
We have already seen how many innovations come from people at the margins of a technology, applying techniques acquired in other contexts. The first true optical-grade glass was developed in 1790 by the Swiss watchmaker Pierre-Louis Guinand, who later worked with the Munich physicist Josef Fraunhofer, himself originally an artisan. In manufacturing, the leader was neither a physician nor an optician but a minister in Rathenow near Berlin: Johann Heinrich August Duncker, an optical hobbyist and inventor with a strong background in physics and mathematics. His treatise on eyeglasses remained a standard work for decades. Duncker received a royal patent for a machine capable of grinding eleven lenses precisely and simultaneously from one drive mechanism. A worldly philanthropist, he was angered by the damage caused by inferior glasses and also concerned about the fate of war victims. Employing disabled veterans and war widows, he provided free glasses for troops and poor children. Rathenow became one of the world’s first centers for the large-scale production of precision goods; by the 1820s the city had two hundred factories, making it the world’s most advanced optical center. Duncker’s invention was said to have achieved for German optics what mechanical looms did for British textiles. So dominant did Germany become that the United States did not even produce optical glass in quantity until supplies were disrupted during World War I.22
In the middle and late nineteenth century, university-trained scientists further transformed the optical industry and the dispensing of eyeglasses. In 1862, the Dutch ophthalmologist Herman Snellen developed the chart (with the E at the top) and the scale (with 20/20 as the norm) still in wide use today. In Germany, the chemist Otto Schott and the physicist Ernst Abbe made the Zeiss works in Jena the world technical leaders by the end of the century. Meanwhile, the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz had founded the modern discipline of physiological optics and refined the ophthalmoscope, which permitted direct inspection of the retina and thus helped to establish ophthalmology as a medical specialty. Helmholtz also increased the prestige of optics by demystifying the human eye, arguing powerfully that its imperfections show Darwinian adaptation rather than omnipotent design. Alone, the eye would be an unsatisfactory camera; as used by the mind, it had evolved into a superb instrument of understanding. Since we have been unconsciously manipulating its impressions all along, a reader would conclude, it is perfectly reasonable to improve them further with optics. To determine just which corrections the eyes needed, Edison’s electric light made possible new generations of diagnostic equipment, including refracting instruments that could test countless lens combinations for determining prescriptions.23
INFORMATION AND MYOPIA
Never had science or technology changed the everyday appearance and behavior of ordinary people so strikingly as in the hundred years following Duncker’s high-minded venture. The answer is not just in the new knowledge but in the demand that encouraged them. Mass literacy made vision aids a necessity for tens of millions of people. The governments of northern Europe and North America, especially in the middle and later years of the century, saw increasing economic and military value in extending fluency in reading and writing from the middle class and the cities to the countryside, and later from boys to girls. New industrial processes and military weapons alike made written instructions important throughout the ranks. As we have seen in the history of the typewriter, women were beginning to dominate the clerical workforce.
Prussia, the birthplace of the modern eyeglass industry, led the world in establishing a rigorously controlled school network. Matthew Arnold wrote in his 1866 report to the Schools Inquiry Commission that Germany’s educational system “in its completeness and carefulness is such as to excite the foreigner’s imagination,” and the German victory over France in 1871 was widely credited as much to the Prussian schoolmaster as to the drill sergeant. Prussian male illiteracy was already below 5 percent when the war broke out, but France and England had almost closed the gap by 1900, when virtually everyone in northern and western Europe could read and write—one of the most impressive government programs in history, both the cause and effect of the explosion of inexpensive reading materials thanks to steam presses, wood-pulp paper, and national postal systems.24
In the nineteenth century, reading appeared in a different light, no longer as the attribute of a clerical and administrative elite but as a mental skill indispensable to the new industrial world of complex equipment and printed manuals and regulations. Governments also needed literate populations to enforce policies and mobilize opinion, and manufacturers’ marketing depended on posters and advertisements. Reading was the mental technique that was essential to the maintenance and operation of nineteenth-century technology.
The Victorians, now considered the staunchest apostles of progress, should have been ecstatic at the spread of reading and writing skills to the masses. Many early-twenty-first-century academics and writers look to the late nineteenth as a golden age of print and educational reform. Of course, there had been warnings against the perils of bookishness since antiquity and, as we have seen, in the Renaissance. Even in the early nineteenth century, in the golden age of German classicism, social critics warned of Lesewut, literally “reading mania.” The masses, it seems, just could not win; they were either illiterate or foolishly ambitious.25
By the 1860s, the old critique of the perils of print had new support from an unexpected quarter, the medical profession itself. Physicians had long been concerned about the effects of reading on the bodies of schoolchildren; we have noted that health reformers were trying to improve classroom seating decades before corresponding innovations in factories and offices. By the 1870s, the new instruments for measuring vision were revealing an unexpected trend: nearsighted children.
Not surprisingly, the first warning appeared in the land that contemporaries identified with educational standards, precision workmanship, and optics: Prussia. And the diagnostician was the leading ophthalmologist of Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland), Dr. Hermann Ludwig Cohn (1836— 1906). As a young man he published An Investigation of the Eyes of 10,060 School Children (1867), the first major epidemiological study of vision, assailing the dim lighting and cramped seating of traditional schools. In his travels he examined the eyes of nomads like the Bedouins, of hunter-gatherers, and of the illiterate peasants of some of Germany’s remote areas. Their excellent distance vision impressed him, and he blamed the growing prevalence of myopia on the heavy reading loads and detailed work of late-nineteenth-century education and industry.26
Thanks to Cohn’s influence, doctors from St. Petersburg and Tiflis to New York City and Cincinnati were testing schoolchildren for myopia and other conditions; in 1886 Cohn listed forty studies involving hundreds of schools, including Harvard. Evidence was overwhelming that the rate of myopia increased from grade to grade, suggesting that additional reading was changing the shapes of students’ eyes permanently. In Cohn’s own studies, the proportion of nearsighted students rose from 5 percent in the countryside to fully half the graduating classes of the Gymnasien. Book learning was, it seemed, hazardous to visual acuity.27
Cohn’s warnings were hardly isolated. While the rest of Europe and North America were largely celebrating the Reich’s secondary schools, Germany’s doctors, politicians, and parents deplored “overburdening,” which allegedly was leading to a soaring suicide rate and “nervous debility.” To Cohn and his supporters, myopia was another manifestation of the physical and mental “diseases of civilization” brought on by crowded cities, pollution, business pressures, and lack of fresh air and exercise. The flood of information seemed overwhelming. Literally and figuratively shortsighted, industrial humanity appeared to be walking into an evolutionary trap, as success in life paradoxically produced physical and mental infirmity.28
For all this agitation, there were equally noted physicians and critics who virtually welcomed the spread of myopia and of eyeglasses. Cohn was scandalized by his Dutch colleague F. C. Donders, author of the international standard work on eye examinations
. The higher degrees of myopia were serious, Donders admitted, but could be prevented with timely spectacle prescriptions; as for the milder forms, they “bring a capacity for delicate hand work and scientific investigation that we would not like to do without.” Donders wrote that he would not want to abolish mild myopia even if he could, as it was a sensible accommodation of the eye to practical needs. It would not bother him if it turned out that the scholar and the peasant each developed the eye most suitable for his use. Another German expert flatly declared that education and skills demanded physical and mental sacrifices, and a third compared myopia to the military surrender of life for the Fatherland. Where Cohn saw sickness and danger, and called Donders’s “delicate hand work” “generally superfluous,” many others found what they considered Darwinian adaptation.29
Cohn valiantly advocated better lighting and seating for the schools. He studied typography to find medically optimal fonts and type sizes and even considered requiring tinted schoolbook paper. In fact, many such design reforms were adopted, but in vain. High rates of correctable myopia persisted despite school hygiene programs. Cultural conservatives responded by turning from environmental to hereditary explanations. By 1896, even Cohn had shifted his interest from educational reform to mass testing that would let the German navy identify the part of the German population with unspoiled vision, the better to deploy them in the marine artillery.30
In England and the United States, the school crusade against myopia was less strident and anxiety less pronounced. The growing proportion of eyeglass wearers was seen increasingly as a sign of technological progress rather than of physiological degeneracy. In 1893, the president of the ophthalmological section of the British Medical Association declared approvingly at the society’s annual meeting that with the progress of popular enlightenment and civilization, in the world of the future “a man who goes about with his eyes naked will be so rare that the sight of him will almost raise a blush.” Reporting this speech in the Atlantic Monthly, Ernest Hart summed up educated opinion of the time, that research had shown that very few people have ever had perfect vision and that the prevalence of glasses reflected the progress of scientific diagnoses and treatments since the 1870s. There was no shame in improving the eyes technologically.31
PROUD PROSTHESES
Hart’s report signaled a growing voice against what he called the “croakers of decadence.” For the first time since the golden age of Spain, men (though not yet women) were beginning to flaunt their eyewear as manifestations of the latest in science. The growing number of schoolchildren and young adults wearing glasses had provoked popular scorn as well as elite alarm; the earliest taunts of “four-eyes” and “four-eyed” date both in England and the United States from the 1860s and 1870s. Even the overworked youth of Germany had a similar and still less flattering expression, Brillenschlange, literally “eyeglass-snake,” referring to the pattern on a cobra’s hood.32
A new generation of assertive myopes did not take such taunts passively. There was a growing sense that eyeglass wearing was not just a scientific correction but an extension and expression of the personality. In 1880, for example, a writer in the London Saturday Review remarked that “no artificial adjuncts of the human body are so apparently identical with its nature as spectacles,” and that he knew those who could use them to smile, frown, sneer, and even eat. One such person of the day was Theodore Roosevelt, who went to the Dakota Territory as a (gentleman) cowboy to fortify and demonstrate his manliness and succeeded beyond all expectation. And no deed from that time of his life became more celebrated than knocking out an armed ruffian who had used the dread slur “four-eyes.” (“As I rose,” TR later wrote proudly, “I struck quick and hard with my right just to one side of the point of his jaw, hitting with my left as I straightened out, and then again with my right.…”) During the Spanish-American War he further turned stigma into asset by leading the charge of his company of Rough Riders up San Juan Hill wearing his signature pince-nez, now immortalized on Mount Rushmore.33
In fact, pince-nez, with two lenses mounted on the wearer’s nose and held there with a spring or other pressure system, had already become a wildly fashionable accessory. The same Saturday Review correspondent noted their popularity and marveled at the transformation they produced in the wearer of temple eyeglasses: “You hardly recognize your friend. The face looks but half-clothed, and it wears a rollicking expression which is in strong contrast with the sobriety of its old spectacled days.” It hardly mattered that the spring pressure and weight left indentations on the sides of the nose, that pince-nez were nearly always uncomfortable and easily broken, and that many ophthalmologists and opticians denounced them for their failure to maintain a consistent and proper distance from the pupils. By the turn of the twentieth century, whole Harvard and Vassar classes were sporting pince-nez. Snobbery was part of their appeal; they imparted a superior, “quizzing” gaze like the lorgnette before them, and became a double-barreled monocle. With their black ribbon, ostensibly for protection of the optics, but often for dramatic gestures, pince-nez almost encouraged theatricality. Arthur Conan Doyle knew a great clue when he saw one. (Perhaps because of this perceived arrogance, both military officers and civilian employers in the nineteenth century often required subordinates to address them or even to work without their glasses, even if their actual performance suffered.)34
The pince-nez, kept in place by spring pressure alone, was the first eyewear to become a fad among both men and women. Many ophthalmologists and opticians considered it difficult to fit, and the glasses fell off repeatedly. Yet as this patent specification observes, contemporaries thought the design avoided the “elderly appearance” of spectacles with temples. The inventor believed he had found a better way to make the pince-nez stay put.
Pince-nez soon had bolder competition. In 1913 the Kansas City Star detected “an age glorying in infirmity” and noted “owl-like round lenses the size of twin motor lamps” in “bulky tortoise shell and imitation celluloid.” New materials were at last beginning to expand both performance and expression, if only in helping revive the look of a traditional frame material that had fallen out of favor. In the 1920s and 1930s new materials attracted a generation of celebrities who discovered that big, round glasses could appear youthful and daring: Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and the (alas, only almost) timeless George Burns. Le Corbusier made the common headlamp spectacles into geometric icons of modernity, and postmodernity. In Précisions (1930) he declared the hallmark of the new man of worth to lie “not in the ostrich plumes in his hat, but in his gaze.” Seeming not only to gather but to project information, they have remained favorites of Philip Johnson and I. M. Pei. Female fashion authorities like Diana Vreeland and Carrie Donovan found the look equally appealing.35
Metallic spectacles and pince-nez remained the choice of many of the Versailles generation: Woodrow Wilson, Georges Clemenceau, and especially David Lloyd George. If oversized hard-rubber, celluloid, or plastic spectacles enlarged the eyes of the wearer and exposed him or her to an admiring countergaze, pince-nez continued to connote an earlier, medieval theory of vision: eyes that emit piercing, searching rays, private eyes that bore into public spaces. The pince-nez thus remained favorites of the twentieth century’s own grand inquisitors, Heinrich Himmler and Lavrenti Beria, and of Beria’s most celebrated victim, Leon Trotsky. The metal frame also was the choice of the macho myope in the Roosevelt mode. The writer Isaac Babel, hoping to transcend his identity as a Jew “with spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart,” outdid even TR when he rode with the anti-Semitic Cossack cavalry in the Russian civil war. Franklin Roosevelt’s lifelong use of pince-nez reflected his youthful admiration of the cousin who initially was thought to overshadow the better-looking Franklin in vitality. And like the other technologies we have studied, they changed FDR’s body language early in life, in his case leading him to tilt his head back and literally look down his nose as he spoke to people. It later became Roosevelt’s genius
to turn this affectation into a token of optimism rather than condescension. (Hitler, on the other hand, resisted the public display of eyeglasses, having speeches and documents prepared with special large-character typewriters.)36
GLASSES AND MASSES
World War II was a turning point in the optical modification of the human body. Armies could not afford to exclude soldiers with correctable eyesight, and many Depression-era recruits were properly examined and fitted for the first time in their lives, raising public expectations of visual acuity. In postwar England the spectacle benefit became a symbolic feature of the National Health Insurance system at least until the Thatcher era, and even in fragmented U.S. health care, vision plans remain popular in corporate benefits programs. Once a mark of otherness and later in some quarters of degeneration, eyeglass wearing became the acceptable and even prestigious condition of the majority. Today, six out of ten Americans and Britons wear lenses of some kind.37
The postwar relationship of the body and personality to vision aids has taken two directions: expression and invisibility. Thermoset plastics (unlike the rigid Bakelite that prevailed in the interwar years) gave free reign to fantasy and to experimentation with new designs that could complement every facial shape. Women’s eyewear, long stigmatized, was first to make this leap. As usual, the pioneer came from outside the industry mainstream. A New York artist and window display designer, Altina Schinasi Miranda, bored by the women’s glasses she saw displayed in the city, devised a new pointed look that appealed to Clare Boothe Luce and other stylish and prominent women. Demand exploded in the 1950s, and the fashion press discovered that glasses could be flattering and even sexy. Ever since, celebrities and authorities have turned both men’s and women’s glasses into a quasi-cosmetic art of matching frames with faces and clothing styles. Finding the correct historic spectacle or a suitable futuristic one is a recognized skill of Hollywood production designers— think of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s contoured sunglasses in Terminator — and characters’ eyewear is often reborn as production models to meet demand. The tradition of flamboyant glasses continues with Elton John and Barry Humphries.38