nobody talks about it but like the fact that glasses exist is literally insane
put fucking melted sand in front of your eyeballs and now stuff stops being blurry??? and someone figured this out fuckin hundreds of years ago?
Glass technology evolved because of wine.
Wine used to be stored in clay pots for drinking but then people started blowing glass and realized how pretty wine was in a clear glass bottles. They also realized that glass bottles with curves magnified the image and after decades of experementation they started grinding glass with curves and sand to get that magnification. This is also where the telescope and magnifying glass came from. Eventually after telescopes and looking to the heavens were all the rage people started hand crafting reading glasses which gave their wearers an extra decade of reading with bad eyes. By the mid 1700’s they were common and Ben Franklin figured out how to combine two different magnifications into one lense. By 1900 it was incredibly common to have eyeglasses and actual perscriptions were being developed. Post WWII saw a boom in lense technology filtering down from industrial applications making it cheaper and more affordable. Now days you can typically walk into a dollar store and buy a pair of reading glasses all thanks to some glass blower a thousand years ago that liked to look at his wine.
All of human history comes down to alcohol and horses
