Golf Glasses… Seriously.
Golfing glasses with adjustable swing-out lenses to help the wearer see the ball better, circa 1940s.
Derek C. Davidson was a collector who wrote “Spectacles, Lorgnettes and Monocles”. From his author’s bio: “The late Derek Davidson trained as an optician. He started his own business and a workshop for custom-made fashion spectacles. He also began to collect old spectacles and was the founder of the Ophthalmic Antiques International Collectors Club.”
I own the book, which is small and nice, a bit like a pamphlet almost. When he passed away and there was an estate auction I picked up a few of his more interesting pieces. This is one of them. These glasses were designed around the 1940s for golfers with a pair of hinged secondary lenses that could be swung in or out, depending on whether the wearer was taking a shot. In other words, selective bifocals.
As you can see, Mr. Davidson’s hand written notes remain intact on the lenses, which I think makes them even nicer, sort of like an heirloom within this realm of collecting.
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I have been doing sort of the same thing for forty years – though not as elegantly. We take a kryptok, rotate it 55-60 degrees temporally in the right eye, leaving the left as SVD. When a right handed golfer addresses the ball,the seg is out of their field of vision, but there is still enough for mono near vision to fill out a score card.
Moss, we need the same thing, but only with the segments in the top section, for desktop-using presbyopes!
I can actually imagine seeing them being sold on television very late at night. The infomercial would be mesmerizing…