<P> In 1801, Thomas Young made a pair of basic contact lenses based on Descartes' model . He used wax to affix water - filled lenses to his eyes, which neutralized its refractive power . He then corrected for it with another pair of lenses . </P> <P> However, like da Vinci's, Young's device was not intended to correct refraction errors . Sir John Herschel, in a footnote of the 1845 edition of the Encyclopedia Metropolitana, posed two ideas for the visual correction: the first "a spherical capsule of glass filled with animal jelly", and "a mould of the cornea" that could be impressed on "some sort of transparent medium". Though Herschel reportedly never tested these ideas, they were both later advanced by several independent inventors such as Hungarian Dallos with István Komáromy (1929), who perfected a method of making molds from living eyes . This enabled the manufacture of lenses that, for the first time, conformed to the actual shape of the eye . </P> <P> In 1888, German ophthalmologist Adolf Gaston Eugen Fick constructed and fitted the first successful contact lens . While working in Zürich, he described fabricating afocal scleral contact shells, which rested on the less sensitive rim of tissue around the cornea, and experimentally fitting them; initially on rabbits, then on himself, and lastly on a small group of volunteers . These lenses were made from heavy blown glass and were 18--21 mm (0.71--0.83 in) in diameter . Fick filled the empty space between cornea and glass with a dextrose solution . He published his work, "Contactbrille", in the journal Archiv für Augenheilkunde in March 1888 . </P> <P> Fick's lens was large and unwieldy, and could only be worn for a couple of hours at a time . August Müller in Kiel, Germany, corrected his own severe myopia with a more convenient blown - glass scleral contact lens of his own manufacture in 1888 . </P>

When did the first contact lenses come out