Contact lens

A new way of looking at the world

Otto Wichterle (Proste ̆jov, Moravia, October 27, 1913 – Stražisko, Moravia, August 18, 1998)

How the son of a Czech car manufacturer became passionate about chemistry instead of beautiful cars and how, after a chance chat on the train, he started looking for a substance with which you could make a better artificial eye.

From which finally emerged the soft artificial lens, the first four of which he fabricated on a Christmas Eve with his sons' meccano box on the kitchen table.

How it came about that his American friend received a Rolls Royce from the Dutch Queen Juliana for his knowledge of lenses, while he himself never collected more than a thousand dollars and why he can only be seen with large horn-rimmed glasses in all the photos.

'Men seldom make passes At girls who wear glasses'
— Dorothy Parker, N.Y. World, 1925

– 'What men don't want Are girls with glasses'
Translation by Ivo de Wijs in The Small Hours, 2004

On a fine day in 1952, Otto Wichterle took a train from the town of Olomouc, in his native region, to the capital, Prague, nearly two hundred miles west. He was 39 years old and a professor of macromolecular chemistry at the Technical University of Prague.

He looked over the shoulder of the man next to him to see what he was reading: an article in a journal about the use of titanium for an artificial eye.

Wichterle started a conversation with his fellow traveler and said: 'It would be much better to look for a solution in plastic, material that connects to the surrounding tissue, for example from the category of hydrophilic polymers.' The traveler turned out to be an official of the Ministry of Health who researched substances for their use for medical purposes.

And so it came about that Wichterle received a government grant for research into water-retaining polymers, into imitations of human tissue.

To develop the new artificial eye, he first practiced with small pieces of plastic. In 1957 he put such a piece on his own eye. It was too rough, it burned and it was unpleasant.

But Wichterle immediately saw – literally and figuratively – that his artificial gel could serve not so much to cast an artificial eye, but to make an artificial lens with which you could adjust your vision.

Wichterle was born in 1913 in the Moravian town of Proste ̆jov, then still part of the Austro-Hungarian Danube Monarchy. Today it is located in the east of the Czech Republic.

In 1878 his grandfather Frantisek had founded a factory of agricultural tools and machines.

Frantisek died young, in 1891, barely fifty years old, leaving the company in the hands of his sons Karel and Lambert.

In 1913, the year of Otto's birth, the company had grown into a factory with more than a thousand workers who produced tractors, mowers, threshing machines and other large agricultural equipment.

Otto's father Karel merged the factory with a related company, that of the Kovanic brothers, creating the Wikov brand – van Wi(chterle) and Kov(anic). Under that brand name, the company made the leap to passenger cars and trucks in 1926.

Between 1926 and 1937, a whole series of models were produced. Wikov even had his own racing team. The old-timer Wikovs are still regarded in the Czech Republic as the 'jewels among the veterans'.

As a child, Otto struggled with poor health and dreamed of becoming a musician, he writes in his memoirs. It made sense for his father to follow a course of study related to the automotive industry.

But spurred on by a friend and because a professor of metallurgy pressed him at one point with a chemistry question, he resolutely opted for chemistry.

He graduated in 1935 and started working as a lecturer at the Institute of Experimental Organic Chemistry at the Technical University of Prague.

No doubt the poor economic conditions of the 1930s made the car industry unattractive to a doctor of chemistry.

Gradually, the graceful Wikovs – slightly exaggerated, also called the rolls-royces of Czechoslovakia – gradually disappeared from the streets. Only eight copies of the latter type were sold.

The hero of the shoe factory

In March 1939 Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia and in November Hitler had all universities closed.

A former student later said that he saw with his own eyes how, despite the strict surveillance of German soldiers, Wichterle still managed to smuggle out important research material.

The professor found shelter in the advanced laboratories of the giant Bata shoe factory in Zlín, also Moravia. There he was able to continue his research into plastics throughout the war.

Bata had a modern laboratory that looked for all kinds of plastics for making shoes. Fifty chemistry students who were on the street because of the Germans, were taught illegally by Wichterle. Research was the cover of their studies.

In 1941 he and his colleagues succeeded in drawing and spinning one of these plastics into thread, independently of the development of nylon in the United States.

During the war he kept the new substance secret to prevent the Germans from taking advantage of it; afterwards there was no money to start production for a while.

Women's stockings, socks and shirts could only be manufactured from 1950 onwards with the new fabric – which was given the name 'silon'. Wichterles silon was the Eastern Bloc's answer to Western nylon.

Due to resistance activities – did the Germans suspect that he was withholding research results? – the Gestapo put him in jail for four months in 1942. Students later explained how unobtrusive he could be, as if he were just a fellow student.

In publications and patent applications he conscientiously mentioned everyone's part, including that of the technicians, which was unusual for the time.

After the war, Wichterle went back to work at the Technical University and at the same time he studied for his postgraduate degree in organic chemistry. In those years he wrote a groundbreaking handbook on the subject, which was translated into the West.

Wichterle would write works like this all his life, textbooks that were supposed to make chemistry comprehensible, texts in which the direct usefulness of chemistry for everyday life was demonstrated. Eleven of these also appeared in translation.

In 1948 the communists seized power in Czechoslovakia. They nationalized all the factories: including the Wikov machine factory of the Wichterle family in his hometown of Proste ̆jov, and the huge Bata concern in Zlín.

To a friend in the United States he wrote with some irony – paraphrasing the agrarian slang of the communists: 'The plow that our people pulled in the famous days of February has not reached too great a depth in our institution.'

In 1949 Wichterle became professor of macromolecular chemistry at his TU. When he talked to a civil servant on the train in 1952 about a hydrophilic plastic, he hadn't finished it yet, but he was sure that such a substance was within the possibilities.

In 1954, together with his assistant Drahoslav Lim, he developed the first hydrogel material – hydroxyethyl methacrylate, or HEMA for short: a plastic that is transparent and can absorb up to forty percent water.

Wichterle and Lim initially did not think of lenses, but of artificial veins or implants in the body in general. Until then, all plastics had shown rejection symptoms. HEMA was biocompatible.

Pouring lenses on the kitchen table

In 1958, a political purge followed in communist Czechoslovakia, in which professor of chemistry Wichterle also fell victim.

One of his colleagues later said that an investigation had shown that Wichterle's best students did not have a party card, and that it was precisely the communist party members who got the worst results in his exams.

Barely a year later he was reinstated and was able to teach at a new institute of macromolecular chemistry under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences. In January 1960, Wichterle and Drahoslav Lim published an article about

The first meccano box device

their work in the renowned American weekly magazine Nature: 'Hydrophilic gels for biological use.' 'The possibility of using plastic in permanent contact with living tissue has often been considered. Almost all known plastics have been presented to the outside world for this purpose.

But the question of structural similarity to human tissue has not been adequately considered," they wrote. Thus they attracted the attention of American science.

The establishment of his new institute dragged on, but Wichterle did not wait to stubbornly tinker with the new contact lens… in his own kitchen. He found inspiration in his cup of coffee: while stirring, he discovered the concave shape that the liquid took on due to the centrifugal force.

Could he cast the HEMA plastic lens that way, while turning?

In Czechoslovakia, a variant of the western meccano game, Merkur, has existed since 1925.

Using parts from his two sons' Merkur box, a bicycle dynamo, and afterwards also a small motor from his turntable, he built a machine for pouring lenses – as if he were stirring his coffee.

By Christmas 1961, the first four soft plastic contact lenses—hydrogels, as he called them—were on the table.

They were moist and pliable, able to absorb tears and allow oxygen to pass through to the cornea. A few months later, he and his wife Lidia, a doctor, had produced more than five thousand pieces.

The primitive construction with which he cast the lenses is now exhibited in the National Technical Museum in Prague.

In the early 1960s, Wichterle was given permission to attend a conference in the United States on a number of occasions. There was great interest in the artificial veins, but not in the lenses.

He handed out his contact lenses generously. "Everyone thought the thing was interesting," he later said in an interview, "but more like a joke, like a toy, not something to be taken seriously." The existing lenses made of glass or hard plastic were not sufficient, were sometimes dangerous for the eyes and fell out easily.

But no one saw any benefit in the plastic rubbish. One American thought otherwise: the eccentric optometrist Robert Morrison.

Morrison traveled to Prague ten times and befriended Wichterle. In order to acquire a license, he had to be an employer at Wichterle's, the Academy of Sciences. In 1963, Morrison paid no less than $330,000 for a license.

Inventions provided an opportunity to bring in Western currency and Soviet leader Khrushchev encouraged that course of action.

On Morrison's advice one day in 1964, two lawyers from an American patent office on their way to the Soviet Union stopped in Prague to meet Wichterle. "I took a contact lens out of my eye, threw it on the floor, stepped on it, cleaned it with my tongue and put it back in my eye," said the chemist.

The lawyers were impressed and bought additional patents from the Academy, on the molding technique and on the HEMA fabric, for another million dollars. Wichterle himself had nothing to do with this, he was not involved in the trade at all.

In October 1966, the patent office sold the licenses to Bausch & Lomb, a manufacturer of optical products, for a whopping $3 million.

Funnily enough, the US government determined that the contact lens was a medicine, so approval for commercialization from the Food and Drug Administration had to be awaited. It took three years for that.

In 1971 – ten years after Wichterle's kitchen stunt – the first soft contact lenses came on the market in the United States. Today the lens industry is a billion dollar business. Bausch & Lomb is still the largest contact lens manufacturer in the world.

Morrison, 'Dr. Bob', quickly in contact with the rich of the world.

For example, the Belgian King Boudewijn and through him the Dutch Queen Juliana and her visually impaired daughter Princess Christina. Because of his good care for the princess, 'Dr. Bob' from the Dutch Queen a Rolls Royce gift.

Morrison still wants to tour with it forty years later. With clients from Grace Kelly to the Shah of Persia and everyone of Hollywood fame, Morrison became immensely wealthy.

In stark contrast to Professor Wichterle, who of the hefty sums paid for his invention ended up with only a thousand dollars.

But he took this philosophically: "I should not have known what I should have done with a large sum of money," he said in his old age.

This time definitively 'purified'

In April 1968, the new Czechoslovak Communist Party leader Alexander Dubc ̆ek presented a program of action that initiated the Prague Spring. But already in August the tanks of the Soviet troops rolled into Prague to put an end to that Spring.

Anyone who cheered Spring during that four-month interlude lost their job. Wichterle had signed the controversial '2000-word' manifesto in June. And he had publicly asked the Minister of the Interior very critical questions in parliament.

The new rulers dismissed him as a professor and banned him from teaching and traveling abroad or making contacts there.

The day he prepared to take up a job as a tractor driver - ironically for the son of Czechoslovakia's largest tractor manufacturer - he was accepted back as a regular researcher in the laboratories he had founded and led himself.

For twenty years, until the Velvet Revolution of November 1989 and the fall of communism, his situation would hardly change.

But before 1989 came to an end, he had been elected president of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. When the country was split in 1993, colleagues immediately elected him president of the Czech Academy. That same year, an asteroid got his name.

In total, Wichterle acquired 200 chemical patents relating to plastics, synthetic fibers and biomedical materials. The old man enjoyed great international recognition towards the end of his life.

Ophthalmologists from around the world celebrated his 80th birthday at a 1993 convention at his institute in Prague. 'They came to Prague,' wrote the British newspaper The Independent, 'to honor an intellectual giant.' And at the age of eighty he still turned out to be sharp as a pin, mentally super sharp.

Until 1995, he worked in his private laboratory on the ground floor of his house in Prague on synthetic lenses to restore the sight after cataract surgery. In early 1998 he suffered a stroke, a few months later a heart attack.

In August he died in his sleep at his summer residence in Stražisko, in his native region.

Colleagues and friends unveiled in 2005 in front of the Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry in Prague a two-meter-high bronze monument called the 'Tree of Knowledge': each branch bears the number of a patent that the professor had acquired for one of his inventions.

On that occasion, too, the speakers pointed to Wichterle's modesty, his British humor and his always informal interaction.

A gentle scholar, they said, who had bowed to no regime. In almost all the photos he can be seen with large, brown, horn-rimmed glasses. No contact lenses? "Hm, I don't like wearing them," he said of the invention that made him so famous.