The first eye covering to be seen…

The first eye covering to be seen through and tolerated is produced by a German glassblower, F.E. Muller, in 1887.

The German ophthalmologist Adolf Gaston Eugen Fick constructs and fits the first successful contact lens in 1887.

While working in Zürich, he describes fabricating afocal scleral contact shells, which rest on the less sensitive rim of tissue around the cornea, and experimentally fitting them: initially on rabbits, then on himself, and lastly on a small group of volunteers.

These lenses are made from heavy blown glass and are eighteen to twenty-one millimeters in diameter.

Fick fills the empty space between cornea/callosity and glass with a dextrose solution.

He will publish his work, "Contactbrille", in the journal Archiv für Augenheilkunde in March 1888.

Fick's lens is large, unwieldy, and can only be worn for a couple of hours at a time.

Leonardo Da Vinci is frequently credited with introducing the idea of contact lenses in his 1508 Codex of the eye, Manual D, where he described a method of directly altering corneal power by submerging the eye in a bowl of water.

Leonardo, however, did not suggest his idea be used for correcting vision—he was more interested in learning about the mechanisms of accommodation of the eye.

René Descartes had proposed another idea in 1636, in which a glass tube filled with liquid is placed in direct contact with the cornea.

The protruding end was to be composed of clear glass, shaped to correct vision; however, the idea was impracticable, since it would make blinking impossible.