Word: feinbloom
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last week Manhattan's equally fertile and inventive Optometrist William Feinbloom (TIME, Jan. 2, 1933 et seq.) told a Buffalo gathering of optometrists how he had adapted the Fresnel lens to make trioptic spectacles for the near-blind. Feinbloom has concentrated for decades on the problem of 500,000 Americans who are legally blind (less than 10% useful vision), but who could read and work if only they could get the right glasses. Previous Feinbloom inventions supplied correction for only one focal range (close work such as reading and sewing, middle range for dressing and household tasks, or distance...
...Feinbloom's new device is a three-in-one, like the executive's trifocals. Most of the field (both sides and the middle) consists of plastic with no magnification, corrected only for distortion caused by the refractive errors in the patient's eye. This is for middle distance-3 to 25 ft. At the top is a thick oval lens, apres Fresnel, with three-power magnification for distance-"infinity," which begins at 25 ft. At the bottom is a similar lens with magnification of 3 to 20 diameters for reading, sewing or benchwork. Cost of the three...
...visited eye specialists repeatedly, but they held out no hope for him. Recently, during a Florida vacation, his wife read him a story from TIME about Dr. William Feinbloom of Columbia University, who had developed doublet eyeglasses, enabling the near-blind to see (Dec. 15). When Mr. & Mrs. Pitt got back from their vacation, they found that four different friends had sent them copies of the story. Pitt visited Dr. Feinbloom, was fitted with the new glasses. Confronted with a printed page, Pitt discovered he could read whole words; before, with the aid of the most powerful reading glass...
...achieve this, Dr. Feinbloom applied the principle of the microscope and made doublet lenses-really two lenses in a plastic rim, with a sealed air space in between. He also flattened the outer curves of the lenses from spherical to paraboloid shapes. The doublet lenses focus at infinity and the eye itself makes the focusing adjustment for objects beyond a few feet away. A short-focus pair is used for reading...
...show what the doublet glasses can do, Dr. Feinbloom told of a twelve-year-old Ohio girl who was born with part of the retina missing. Her sight was so poor that she could not go to regular schools and was learning Braille. With doublet glasses she breezed through elementary school. She got through high school with honors and now, at 17, is in college taking journalism and working part time as a reporter...