Word: leonardos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Boom. Foreshadowed by Leonardo da Vinci in 1508, contact lenses were first made in Europe in the 1880s. They were big, covering most of the sclera (the white of the eye), heavy (made of glass), hard to fit and forbiddingly expensive. Early plastic lenses were also of the big scleral type, had to float on a bath of special wetting fluid, and could be worn only four to five hours at a stretch. Then came the methyl-methacrylate plastics (of the Plexiglas family), the discovery that fluid was unnecessary if lenses had a hole to permit tears to pass beneath...
...lingo being English. His cosmetics, says he grandly, are drawn from history, e.g., General Potemkin's letters taught him the oils used by Catherine the Great (Siberian fir needles, hay, geranium and lilac), and Anne Marie's exercises are supposedly based on a calisthenics drill devised by Leonardo da Vinci. "It is not a lesser masterpiece than his Mona Lisa...