Optics
- Historic Period: 2,000 to 2,500 BCE – Ancient Mesopotamia
Many assume that glasses or lenses for vision and equipment did not come around until Ben Franklin. Yet studies on the properties of light go back several centuries, and a lot of this was used to eventually create lenses and optical instruments. In fact, the ancient Greeks developed very early forms of optics, but the ancient Mesopotamians created the oldest known lenses made from crystal, likely quartz. The lenses date back to between 2,000 to 2,500 BCE. When glass was shown to have reflective and distorted visuals, the idea of lenses among others slowly developed into ancient lenses. However, the world of optics really ramped up in the CE period.