DIY adjustable glasses for the Third World

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Physicist's vision for helping world's poor: self-adjusting eyeglasses

Joshua Silver, a lifelong tinkerer, was fiddling around one day with a cheap, water-filled lens he'd built as an optics experiment when he noticed something interesting.

"I was struck by the quality of the vision I could get with a device I could make for pennies and I could adjust myself," remembers Silver, an Oxford University atomic physicist. "My immediate thought was, 'If I can correct my own vision so easily, could other people?' "

Yes, it turns out. Eyeglasses using Silver's simple, self-adjusting technology are now poised to revolutionize the way the world's poor - and quite possibly the rest of us - see, potentially coming to the aid of billions who struggle to squint enough to farm, study, drive or hold down any job.

"With this technology, you can make your own prescription eyewear," said Silver, who has so far turned out about 30,000 pairs of the cheap glasses. He hopes to find funding to distribute a billion pairs to people around the world too poor to afford glasses or living in places like sub-Saharan Africa, where the ratio of opticians to residents is purportedly 1 to 1 million. (see more at physorg.com, the UK newpaper, The Guardian and Joshua Silver's website for this product, Adaptive Eyecare)