Remember When?

[rbaker]

Remember when frames were supplied in two envelopes, one containing the front and the other containing the temples and you had to assemble the darn things yourself? You then had to file the butt ends of the temples. This was usually one of the first things that the new employee spent most of his time doing.

Do you remember when AO and B&L had labs in every city?

Do you remember when you bought all of your frames, stock lenses, supplies and machinery from a local wholesale lab?

Do you remember cribbing lenses?

Do you remember edging lenses before the introduction of diamond wheels?

Do you remember modifying and blending PMMA CL's in-office?

How about tangent screens and retinoscopy?

Did I forget anything?

[harry a saake]

yeh, you forgot blocking with pitch

[Chris Ryser]

Did I forget anything?

How about drilling holes for rimless mountings like Numont
in heavy minus lenses with a real diamond drill and dropping linseed oil for cooling so the diamond would not overheat.

Polishing rimless edges on a felt wheel using polishing white.

How about heating the old celluloid frames over an open Bunsen gas burner, and the frame occasionally catching fire, and you had to blow out the flame as fast as you could. Then sand the burnmark and re polish on the buffer with Paris red or white.

[SharonB]

Ouch! I remember all of that stuff better than I can remember what I had for dinner last night! What about SAP lenses,and a time when PAL had nothing to do with progressive lenses?

[peyes]

Executive PGX Trifocals

[Don Gilman]

generator oil
+cylinders
hand fining and polishing

[optical24/7]

Reducing the size of a FT or RD seg in glass by hand in a pan and spindle and spherical tool.

[rbaker]

generator oil
+cylinders
hand fining and polishing

Ohh . . . I don't know how I could have forgotten hand rocking cylinders. I still have no feeling in my fingers. But, you know, after a few hundred pairs you get pretty good at it.

One of my first jobs at AO was roughing down the front surface of fused bifocals and trifocals in a sphere pan; hundreds of em, yea, thousands of em. They just kept coming and coming. Do you also recall the term "base curve shock" when AO introduced the Tillyer Masterpiece series of lenses. They relegated the Orthogon series on lenses to the dust bin.

How about the revolutionary AO Tri-Matic edger?

[icmor]

Crimping the edges of glass lenses to form the shape of the frame. . . and boxes and boxes of frame pattern shapes.

[Plausible]

30, 60, 90, grit for the fining tub

[PRECISIONLAB]

...and every piece of equipment was Coburn / AO Green

[Plausible]

Cleaning the slop out of the Coburn glass generator's 3 tubs every evening. Getting an occasional glass shard in your finger / fingers and then having to rebalance the tubs after putting them back in.

[obxeyeguy]

AO red-dots
Optyl 1017
Rocco

[obxeyeguy]

Executive PGX Trifocals

In a Logo groove.

[rbaker]

Remember when Opticians were men?

[Chris Ryser]

Remember when Opticians were men?

.................and they even got unionized in the 1970s

[Dr. Bill Stacy]

I remember some of that, plus kirk hardners and early chem hardners. At least if the kirk failed you only lost 1 lens, but if the power went off or the element burned out you woke up to a solidified mess of broken lenses, in my case 10 pair or so.

BTW I still use a retinoscope on occasion. Like when the autorefractor is a mile off or can't even establish a target. Or when I can't get 20/20 and want a good direct look at the optics. And I still use my favorite snipe nose pliers I bought in optometry school in 1965. They were not made in America. I use them every day, and the chromium finish is still beautiful.

[Barry Santini]

Polymils

B

[CME4SPECS]

AO twist nosepads, you needed a special tool to turn the metal post so the pad would stay in place. I still have the tool, in the drawer with the red dot extractor.

[fjpod]

Oh my. Old home day....

[fjpod]

Remember when PAL stood for plastic aspheric lenticular?

[COMEINPEACE]

APHAKICS were the norm
oops the candle just blew out in my lensometer

photogray xtra was cutting edge

pattern boards

[smallworld]

Remember when eyeglasses didn't have temples for 350 years? I'm still stumped it took that long to figure out.

[COMEINPEACE]

groloman (spelling) fitting device for progressives
we were bamboozled into thinking it actually worked!

[fjpod]

I think it was Grolman. Today we try to do the same thing on an iPad....that makes it "more better".