$20 Self Adjustable Pump-Action Glasses
Silver's specs are adjustable. The lenses comprise flexible membranes containing silicone oil. Using syringes (seen in the picture), the amount of oil can be adjusted and the refractive index of the lenses changed. The syringes are detachable.
This is big, because it means a single, uniform product can be mass produced and then tweaked at its destination without specialized equipment. Silver has already shifted 30,000 pairs -- 20,000 of which were bought by the US Department of Defense and sent to Africa and Eastern Europe.
The current price is a pretty cheap $19, but is expected to drop to a fraction of that as scale economy kicks in. Let's just hope somebody a little less patronizing buys the next batch. According to the Washington Post, the DoD-shipped specs have been customized:
Those glasses have a small U.S. flag and "From the American People" engraved in small print on one side of the frames.
From a Visionary English Physicist, Self-Adjusting Lenses for the Poor [Washington Post]
Good point. Curmudgeon.
Also, I don't think it is too bad to have the flag and that message on there. Maybe, just possibly, these could get into the hands of a child that could be a potential terrorist and maybe, just maybe, that child would see these glasses are realize we aren't so bad and decide not to try and kill us.
Yes and maybe another kid will get the glasses and see the irony while wearing them to see while building his dirty bomb and kill half the state of New York.
There is a book called World Changing Ideas which contains this and many similarly COOL inventions. The book is tough to find, but the ISBN is 9780955304606 and its distributed but Independent Publishers Group out of Chicago. Certainly it should be on Amazon database.
I'm sick of Anti-Americanism and sick of comments like this in "reporting". Don't piss me off to the point where I won't read Wired. There was no reason for you to slap your spiteful opinion into an otherwise educational piece. It can earn you nothing while it could cost you something.
Can it deal with astigmatism, though?