In 1940, Germany launched an air attack known as the Battle of Britain. As part of the medical service during World War II, ophthalmologist Nicholas Harold Lloyd Ridley came into contact with pilots who suffered from eye injuries. Many injuries included fragments of airplane canopies made of polymethyl methacrylate, a.k.a. PMMA or Perspex (PMMA canopy from British Spitfire plane shown at right). Dr. Ridley noticed the plastic canopy fragments were relatively inert and well-tolerated by the eye. These observations had to be put on hold, however, as World War II progressed. While Dr. Ridley was operating on a cataract patient after the war, a resident remarked it was a pity not to be able to replace the removed lens. This motivated Dr. Ridley to begin thinking about intraocular lens (IOL) implants. Dr. Ridley took his observations of Perspex to the Rayner Co. of London in 1949 and developed the world’s first IOLs. The Ridley IOL (shown at left) consisted of a simple plastic disk with a raised edge inside a white plastic container. In 1996, Dr. Ridley reflected, “Was intraocular surgery started a generation too soon? No, the time was both right and ripe. Immediately after a major war, many were accustomed to accepting risk of injury. If implants had not started in 1949, they might have been delayed for yet another 40 years.”
Courtesy the Foundation of the American Academy of Ophthalmology’s Museum of Vision and museumofvision.org
