The extremely fine Tech Museum in San Jose, California, has announced its annual 25 laureates here and in a press release. The list includes MIT Open Courseware and AMD's Personal Internet Connector or PIC, which I wrote about in my column in Online on November 4 last year.
What caught my eye in this year's list, however, was the award to Dr Joshua Silver from Oxford University. He's tackled the problem that hundreds of millions of people need glasses and can't get them, mostly because they live in the third world. The citation says:
Joshua Silver invented low-cost glasses that can be tuned by the wearer. These ingenious spectacles have "adaptive lenses," which consist of two thin membranes with liquid between them. The wearer simply looks at an eye chart and pumps in more or less fluid to change the curvature of the lens, which adjusts the prescription.
The Adaptive Eyecare glasses were praised in Fast Company magazine in 1998, and were a Grand Award Winner in the Popular Science 'Best of What's New' Awards for 2000. His Oxford U page is here.
It turns out that fluid-filled lenses have a long history -- see, for example, the trivia contest at the Patently-O: Patent Law Blog. I hadn't thought of it before, but given the way the human eye works, I'd expect the idea to be much older.
