The Woohoo! Report

Andy Johnson, CTV.ca News Staff

Joshua Silver has a vision.

His lofty goal, one he has been working on for nearly the past two decades, is to provide eyeglasses to half the world’s population.

And he might actually succeed. The professor of atomic physics at Oxford University has spent the better part of the past 20 years inventing a set of “self-refractory spectacles.”

What that means in layman’s terms, he explained to CTV.ca, is that the wearer can adjust the prescription of the lenses to match their personal needs.

“The way my eyeglasses work is you have a lens which is not a conventional lens, it’s more like the lens inside your eye in that it can change its focusing power,” Silver said.

The clunky black frames work on the principle that the thicker the lens, the more powerful the vision correction they offer.

Using a set of syringes to inject fluid between two lenses, the wearer can self-adjust, or tune, the glasses until they are just right for his eyes — no optician or optometrist required.

The simple concept has the potential to change how two billion people view the world. By Silver’s own calculations, that’s how many people in the world require sight-correction, but currently don’t have it.

According to some estimates, there is only one optometrist for every one million people in sub-Saharan Africa.

“It’s very important,” Silver says bluntly, when asked why he has dedicated 20 years to the project.

“You’ve got half the world’s population that can’t see properly, so it’s important. I think that about answers it.”

Most people would balk at those numbers, but Silver sees them as a manageable problem that his invention can solve.

So far, Silver’s glasses have gone out to 30,000 people in 15 African countries. The vast majority of the recipients have no access to an optician, and would otherwise have no way of correcting their vision.

About 10,000 pairs of the frames were distributed in Ghana through the country’s education ministry, while another 20,000 were distributed throughout Africa by a humanitarian program operated by the U.S. military.

But that’s only a modest start to a very ambitious project.

“We’ve put some 30,000 pairs out there, and now our challenge is to scale up, so eventually we have a billion or a few billion pairs of our glasses distributed,” Silver said.

He hopes to accomplish that goal by 2020, and intends to get a good start on it within in the next year.

By the end of 2009 he plans to have one million pairs of glasses distributed in India, reaching some of the country’s poorest and most under-served citizens.

The target cost of manufacturing the glaringly simple invention, is $1 per pair.

Literacy efforts in developing nations might also get a boost from Silver’s crusade. If people can’t see, he pointed out, they can’t read.

And almost all adults over 45, regardless of their health or living standard, require some form of vision correction, he said.

“So if you try to teach adults who have missed out on reading, to read in a literacy class, you will find that unless you provide them with eyeglasses they won’t be able to read because they won’t be able to see the print,” Silver said.

That’s just one example. Fishermen who receive the glasses can once again mend their own nets, weavers can thread their looms, cobblers can continue their craft — the list goes on.

Silver tells one heart-warming story of a tailor who, due to his failing eyesight, could no longer thread the needle of his sewing machine and had to retire at 38, no longer able to earn a living.

With a pair of new spectacles, however, he was able to return to work and regain the 20 working years he thought he had lost.

It’s stories like that that motivate Silver to remain focused on his goal of changing the way the world sees.

“What I’ve shows is that self-refraction works if you use a suitable device, and lots of people are likely to benefit from that over the years,” he said.

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