A short history of sunglasses: from Inuit slit goggles to the polarizing film

Sunglasses are older than glass lenses. The oldest known are snow goggles made by Inuit and Yupik peoples of the Arctic: strips of bone, ivory or driftwood with a narrow slit cut for each eye, which admitted so little light that snow glare and the UV in it could not burn the cornea. They are thousands of years old and they work. Everything since has been a series of separate inventions, centuries apart, each solving a different problem: hiding the eyes, easing light sensitivity, selling a look, protecting pilots, and finally, in 1936, removing glare with a polarizing film. The lens on your face today contains all of them.

The slit goggle

Snow blindness is a burn of the cornea from UV reflected off snow, and it disables a hunter for days. Arctic peoples solved it with a mask that let through a sliver of light: a narrow horizontal slit for each eye, carved into a strip of caribou antler, walrus ivory or wood, tied on with sinew. The slit reduces the light and UV reaching the eye to a fraction, and it also sharpens vision slightly, the way a pinhole does.

Examples in museum collections are hundreds to thousands of years old. The design has not been improved on for its purpose; modern glacier glasses with side shields are the same idea in a different material. Our snow blindness post covers the injury they prevent.

Smoky quartz in China

Flat panes of smoky quartz, worn over the eyes, appear in Chinese records from around the twelfth century. The accounts that survive say judges wore them in court, and the reason given is not the sun: it was to hide the judge's expression from the parties. The tint was a by-product. Whether they were also used against glare is not recorded.

Tinted spectacles as medicine

In eighteenth-century Europe, opticians made spectacles with tinted lenses, blue or green, for people whose eyes were painfully sensitive to light. James Ayscough, a London instrument maker, wrote in the 1750s that he thought tinted glass eased certain vision problems. These were prescribed, not sold for the sun, and they carried the connotation of an eye condition for a century and more. Yellow-tinted spectacles were later issued to some patients recovering from syphilis, which did nothing for the reputation.

Mass production and the boardwalk

The step from medical curiosity to object people wanted came in 1929. Sam Foster, of Foster Grant, began selling inexpensive celluloid-framed sunglasses from a stand on the Atlantic City boardwalk. They were cheap, they were for the beach, and they sold in numbers no optician had imagined.

Hollywood did the rest. Film stars wore them to hide from studio lights, from fans, and from the flash of press cameras, and photographs of stars in sunglasses made them a thing to have. By the mid-1930s sunglasses were a fashion object in America, and the meaning had flipped from concealing an ailment to signalling glamour.

The aviator, 1936

Pilots flying at altitude in open cockpits were in more UV and glare than anyone on the ground, and they were getting headaches and, at worst, retinal damage. The US Army Air Corps commissioned Bausch & Lomb to produce a lens for them. The result, in 1936, was a large, slightly drooping, teardrop-shaped green lens in a thin metal frame that sat under a leather flying helmet. The shape covered the whole eye socket including the downward glance at the instruments. It was sold to the public the next year as the Ray-Ban Aviator, and the frame shape has been in continuous production since.

The pilot's requirements still define what pilots wear; our pilot post covers why the one thing they do not wear is a polarized lens.

The polarizing film, 1936

The same year, Edwin Land, who had invented a practical sheet polarizer in 1929 and founded what became Polaroid, applied it to sunglasses. Before Land, polarizing light required a bulky crystal. His sheet was a plastic film with aligned molecules that absorbed one plane of light, thin enough to laminate inside a lens.

The effect on glare was immediate and it was the first time a lens did something to light other than dim it. Reflected glare off water, roads and snow vibrates mostly horizontally; a film blocking that plane removes it and leaves the scene. Our polarized vs non-polarized post explains the physics that Land's film exploited, and every pair on this site carries a descendant of it, laminated inside a tri acetate cellulose lens.

The lens today

What followed were refinements: plastic lenses replacing glass from the 1940s, polycarbonate from the 1970s, UV standards from the 1980s, mirror coatings, photochromic dyes, hydrophobic layers. Our lens materials post and coatings post cover the stack a modern lens has become.

The three ideas at the core have not changed. Let through less light, which the Inuit did with a slit. Block ultraviolet, which the Air Corps needed for its pilots. And remove reflected glare, which Land's film did in 1936 and which nothing has replaced.

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