Physicist invents self-adjusting lenses for the poor

Oxford: Joshua Silver remembers the first day he helped a man see.

Henry Adjei-Mensah, a tailor in Ghana, could no longer see well enough to thread the needle of his sewing machine. He was too poor to afford glasses or an optometrist.

Then Silver, an atomic physicist who also taught optics at Oxford University, handed him a pair of self-adjusting glasses he had designed, and suddenly the tailor's world came into crystal-clear focus.

"He grinned and started operating his machine very fast," said Silver, 62, who aims to distribute his special glasses throughout the developing world. Silver said he wants to provide eyeglasses to more than a billion people with poor eyesight. For starters, he hopes to distribute a million pairs in India over the next year or so.

In the United States, Britain and other wealthy nations, 60 to 70 per cent of people wear corrective glasses, Silver said. But in many developing countries, only about 5 per cent have glasses because so many people have little access to eye-care professionals.

Even if they could visit an eye doctor, the cost of glasses can be more than a month's wages. This means that many schoolchildren cannot see the blackboard, bus drivers can't see clearly and others can no longer fish, teach or do other jobs because of failing vision.

"It's about education, economics and quality of life," Silver said. The glasses, which are made in China, are not sleek. In fact, he acknowledged, "detractors call them ugly." He said the design can be improved, but the current model are thick dark frames with round lenses.