OTTO WICHTERLE CONTACT LENSES
Today, contact lenses are used by 100 million people the world over. Just like Fleming and his discovery of penicillin or Nobel and his discovery of dynamite, chemist Otto Wichterle would probably not have been able to discover soft contact lenses were it not for a series of accidents. In 1952, Wichterle was on his way to Prague by train. He sat down beside a man who was reading a medical journal. He glanced at what his fellow traveller was reading and saw an advertisement for tantalum eye prosthetics. As a plastics expert, it immediately occurred to him that perhaps plastic would be better tolerated by the eye than metal. It was then that chance again played a lead role. According to Mr Wichterle’s wife Linda Wichterlová, we now know that the idea to create contract lenses from gel, i.e., coagulants, came to her husband when he was mixing his coffee with a spoon and was observing the surface, which was forming a parabola. Over the next few years, Wichterle and his pupil, Drahoslav Lím, worked on developing gel substances suitable for the production of contact lenses. In 1955, chance came to the rescue one more time. One day, Lím forget to finish the work he had started because he was rushing home. In the morning, however, he discovered that the substance he had been preparing had formed into a soft, transparent material with properties ideal for making soft contact lenses. The first prototype of the “lens machine” was built by Wichterle using Merkur, a popular children’s building set, driven by a dynamo from his adult son’s bike. On Christmas Eve 1961, the first four soft contact lenses were made in Wichterle’s home. However, as Otto Wichterle was a thorn in the side of the Communist regime, he did not get the recognition he deserved for the 152 patents in his name – one of which gave women nylon stockings – until the totalitarian regime fell in 1989.
19