Contact lenses

Historical Significance: Theodore Obrig (1896-1967) is an early pioneer in contact lenses. He entered the optical industry with Gall & Lemke Optical Company in 1914 as a graduate of Columbia University. His father was a shareholder but he soon re-entered college as a medical student but never completed. He volunteered for the French Army Ambulance corps in World War 1 later transferring to the US army as a bacteriologist and physiological chemist. He returned to Gall & Lemke inventing the Myodisc bifocal, which was later made under licence in UK by Hamblin's and Stigmat as the Myoplet. Obrig's interest in contact lenses began in 1930 when he became an agent for Zeiss instigating their change to impression lens fitting in 1935. He published Modern Ophthalmic lenses and Optical Glass the same year. In Australia the provision of contact lenses in clinical practice did not really start until the 1950s and even then there were few optometrists who undertook contact lens practice among them Victorian optometrists John Strachan, William Swinnerton, Penrhyn Thomas ,and Ernst Goetz fitted Ziess contact lenses in the 1930s. Obrig was not an optometrist but a technical innovator who made contact lenses and taught ophthalmologists, optometrists and opticians how to fit them. He was doing this in the late 1930s. The first Obrig all-plastic contact lens was produced in 1938. This is an early text book on contact lenses. See also Dickinson 1946 (#176), Bier 1953 (#494), Mandell 1965 (# 507, and Thomas 1960? (#558), Anderson 1944 (#575). Copy 2 is in the Archive room. East wall. Books of historical note. Obrig was President of Obrig Laboratories, retiring in 1952.