Well, as most of you know from my past writings, I am a big fan of ladies that wear glasses. I like them all, but I have a really soft spot for the girls that wear higher minus prescriptions.  The only thing that diminishes my fetish is to run across a girl with extremely strong lenses, but with poor vision.   However, lately all I seem to run across are the ladies with low minuses.

Actually, when I think about it, ladies in low minuses that wear glasses, rather than contact lenses for distance, and reading glasses for up close are much more attractive.  And it does seem like there are a lot of low minus ladies that are not getting suckered into the eye surgery.  But, contact lenses, as well as eye surgery have really diminished my viewing pleasures.

I spend a fair bit of time in the internet, searching the vision related topics.  If you have visited some of the sites, especially Eye Scene, you will have seen a posting or two from me.  But what you don’t know is that I am also interested in black holes, time travel, and many other forms of energy and mass propulsion. It is very intriguing to me to think that possibly a person could move back, or forward in time.

I had corresponded with another time travel enthusiast for a couple of years.  One day I received e-mail from him telling me that he had done it.  It was indeed possible to travel back in time. I wasted no time in contacting him, and by that night I was on an airplane, bound eventually for his lab.  I landed, rented a car, and since it was too late to call on him that evening, I rented a room at a local motel.

The next morning I arrived at his home, where I was greeted with enthusiasm.  He needed a second person to activate his plans, and I was the only one he could think of that wouldn’t laugh at him if this failed.  We went through to his lab, and there in the center of the room sat a chair, much like a barber’s, or a dentist’s chair. Wires ran from a computer on the table to the chair, and there was something that looked like a headset.

We conferred for quite a while about the chance that something might go wrong, and whoever went might not return.  I made my point about me being the one that should go, as he had the technical knowledge to bring me back, along with the ability to manipulate the machine.   So, it was decided that the following day I was to be the one that traveled back through time. 

When he asked where I wanted to go in time, I thought for a minute, and decided that the 1930’s would be my best point.  I didn’t tell him why, but you the reader can probably guess, as the 30’s were the beginning of the contact lens.

It was too late that day to try a send off, so we agreed that we would do it early the next morning.  I went by the local library, and refreshed myself with more details on the invention of the contact lens.  I found out that a Dr. A.E. Frick was the first one to devise contact lenses, in 1887 and 1888. 

These lenses never gained acceptance, as they were ground from glass, were very large, and were practically impossible to wear.  However, I had asked my friend to send me back to the 30’s, so I checked some more.  Yes, I was correct. Dr. Theodore E. Obrig, in 1938 came up with the first wearable plastic contact lens.

So, the next morning I was off for 1938.  I was hooked up, and there was a blinding light.  I felt things rushing all around me, and there I was, back in time.  I knew it was the 30’s, because the first car I saw was a 1932 Ford V8 in perfect condition.  I checked around, and discovered where Dr. Obrig was located.  I had no idea what I was going to do to retard the development of contacts, but I knew I had to do something.  I had come all this way back in time, and I wasn’t about to fail.

I found Dr. Obrig’s house, and his workshop, and after the evening lights had gone out I broke into the workshop.  After rummaging through his desk, I came upon his notebook containing the results all of his experiments. It was quite an extenstive work.

At this point, I discovered that he had not perfected the lenses, but he had come a long way. My knowledge of chemistry, math and physics came in handy here. I changed some symbols in the chemical reactions and altered a few of the mathematical equations so that they would be impossible to solve. I continued until I was satisfied I had sabotaged his work to the point that he would never get close to inventing the contact.

I wandered around for a few more days, checking things out, and trying to imagine what it would be like living back in the 30’s. The pace of life was so much simpler that I almost felt like staying.  I went to Chicago, and wandered around the loop, trying to check out the ladies in glasses.  There were some, but they were not as plentiful as I had hoped. 

I did find a couple of ladies that wore pretty strong minuses, but the style of the day was small round lenses in wire frames, and the thickness was not that apparent.  They actually looked quite good, but I was laughing inside, as the styles of the 90’s had come back to the same shapes I was seeing.  All too soon it became time to go back to 1999.

My return was a success, and I described everything to my friend. He asked where I wanted to go to next, so I suggested 1887 or 1888.  And, again I was off.   My prime search was of course for Dr. Frick, but travel in the 1800’s wasn’t all that easy.

I had no money to buy a train ticket, but I had thought about that, so I had gone back and gotten the winners of the horse races at Belmont for that period of time.  I earned a few dollars doing menial labor, and with this small stake, I started betting heavily.  Soon I was up to what I considered peanuts, but at the time was considered a small fortune.  Armed with this money I was off.

Traveling by train, then by horse, I soon arrived at Dr. Frick’s.  I again had no idea how I was going to stop him from either discovering contact lenses or writing about them.  I again broke in and found that it wasn’t going to be too difficult to destroy his notes, and experiment results.  And since Dr. Frick was an old man by this time, I felt that he might have a hard time to replicate all his experiments. 

But, just to be on the safe side, I applied for a job as his assistant the very next day.  Soon I was able to convince him that he would never be able to develop a contact lens, and within a couple of months I left him, in failing health, and with a very poor memory.  Finally, I had squashed the development of contact lenses.

So, I returned to my entry point, many weeks after I was originally supposed to return.  I hoped that my friend on the other side was still trying on a daily basis to bring me back, and thankfully he was.

My next trip would be to try to hinder the development of surgery used only to improve vision, such as PRK, and Lasik. So, after some research, again I headed off into the past, but a more recent past this time. It was fantastic to be back in the early 80’s, and I had a hard time concentrating on what my objective was going to be.

I got a job as a janitor at one of the early PRK centers, and immediately began to wreck the trials. I succeeded so well that the FDA banned all further research into vision enhancement surgery, so I was soon on my way back to 1999.

I returned to a world of glasses wearers. It was heaven for me, but I soon realized that no one else took any special notice of glasses.  I would venture a guess that at least 70% of the population wore glasses.  And, quite a large number of them were ladies who had prescriptions above minus 12. 

At my favorite restaurant my regular waitress appeared to take my order, and I almost gasped with shock and surprise at the lovely thick pair of glasses she was wearing.  There were so many ladies that I dealt with on a regular day to day routine that wore great glasses that I was beginning to feel that I had really done the whole world a major favor.

But, I couldn’t stop progress. I was lucky that computers had not been around in 1887, or in 1938, when Dr’s Frick, and Obrig were trying to invent contacts, as if they had been able to communicate with other doctors over the internet, I never would have succeeded.  I was also lucky in that the FDA was so strict in its consumer protection that a few botched operations had caused them to outlaw all vanity eye surgery.

I knew that I had met my match when I read in the papers that the gene that controls vision had been isolated from the human DNA, and soon parents would be able to be tested, and, if it was shown that their child would have a vision problem, the child’s DNA could be repaired prior to birth.  

Then, to top it all off I saw on television a pair of glasses that had cameras mounted in the place of lenses. These cameras projected an image to a microchip attached to the retina.  The image then went to the brain, where it was deciphered much the same as real eyesight was.  This was only in its infancy, but what a step forward this would be for those that were blind.

I hadn’t been wearing any of my glasses over contacts combinations, and one day I realized that I really missed wearing my own high minus glasses.  I went to the cupboard where I keep my collection, and went to get out my contacts. They weren’t where I always kept them, and my first reaction was that someone had stolen them.

Then it dawned on me. They had never been invented. I think I had just discovered my major error.