Google Doodle honors inventor of contact lens Otto Wichterle

Google Doodle today honored Otto Wichterle, the Czech chemist, who invented the contact lens on his birthday anniversary. Today is his 108th birth anniversary. The doodle features a sketch of Wichterle, holding up a contact lens on his index finger. The Google Doodle also shows a ray of passing through an eye-ball and a contact lens.

Google wrote, "Happy birthday, Otto Wichterle - thanks for helping the world see eye to eye!"

Otto Wichterle was born October 27, 1913, at Prostĕjov in the Czech Republic (then, Austria-Hungary). As a lover of science from his youth, Wichterle went on to earn his doctorate in organic chemistry in 1936 from the Prague Institute of Chemical Technology (ICT). He taught as a professor at his alma mater during the 1950s while developing an absorbent and transparent gel for eye implants.

In 1961 he produced the very first soft contact lenses with a DIY apparatus. Wichterle himself wore spectacles. This was made of a child's erector set, a bicycle light battery, a phonograph motor, and homemade glass tubing and moulds. This was the earliest version of the modern contact lenses that are now used.

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