In the beginning was the word, and the word was blurry. That’s because eyeglasses hadn’t been invented yet. If you were nearsighted, farsighted or had an astigmatism, you were out of luck. Everything was blurry. It wasn’t until the late 13th century that corrective lenses were invented and crude, rudimentary things they were. But what did people whose vision wasn’t perfect do before that?They did one of two things. They either resigned themselves to being unable to see well, or they did what clever people always do. They improvised.The first improvised eyeglasses were makeshift sunglasses, of a sort. Prehistoric Inuits wore flattened walrus ivory in front of their faces to block the sun’s rays. In ancient Rome, the emperor Nero would hold a polished emerald in front of his eyes to reduce the sun’s glare while he watched gladiators fight.His tutor, Seneca, bragged that he read “all the books in Rome” through a large glass bowl filled with water, which magnified the...