UK Physicist Invents Cheap Prescription Glasses - Uses Water

OXFORD, England " Joshua Silver, a lifelong tinkerer, was fiddling around one day with a cheap water-filled lens he'd built as an optics experiment when he noticed something interesting.

By adding or removing water he could not only change the power of the lens, he found, but he also could use it to very accurately correct his own nearsightedness when he looked through it.

"I was struck by the quality of the vision I could get with a device I could make for pennies and I could adjust myself," remembers Silver, an Oxford University atomic physicist. "My immediate thought was, 'If I can correct my own vision so easily, could other people?' "

Yes, it turns out. Eyeglasses using Silver's simple, self-adjusting technology are now poised to revolutionize the way the world's poor"and quite possibly the rest of us"see, potentially coming to the aid of billions who struggle to squint enough to farm, study, drive or hold down any job.

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