Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 to April 17, 1790) was a Founding Father and a polymath, inventor, scientist, printer, politician, freemason and diplomat. Franklin helped to draft the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. As an inventor, Benjamin Franklin has created numerous contraptions but the focus is going to be his creation of the Bifocals. As Benjamin Franklin aged, his vision, which had never been great, deteriorated even further. Like many of the instances in his life when an ongoing challenge presented itself, Franklin devised an invention that would help him to see long distances and be able to continue his favorite hobby, reading.
He described his invention as "double-spectacles." The new version of Ben Franklin eyeglasses would come to be known as bifocals. The process of their invention was quite simple. In 1784, Franklin wrote to his optician and made a request: take both his long distance glasses and his reading glasses, slice their lenses in half and then suture the lenses together with the reading lenses on the bottom and the long distance glasses on the top. Franklin would be able to avoid the hassle of switching glasses while he moved between reading and walking about. There is further evidence from other
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Two decades after Franklin's death, Thomas Jefferson requested a pair of bifocals to be crafted for his use and described them as an invention of Dr. Franklin. After wearing them for a time, Jefferson reported to his hyperopic friend that he had "adopted Dr. Franklin's plan of half glasses of different focal distances, with great advantage.” Franklin wrote, in August 1784 to his friend George Whatley, that he was "happy in the invention of double spectacles, which serving for distant objects as well as near ones, make my eyes as useful to me as ever they