Eyeglasses are over 700 years old, and we know it from a sermon.
In 1306 the friar Giordano da Pisa told Florentines that the art of making spectacles was "not yet twenty years" old — so they were invented around 1286.
More amazing facts
- 1281 · 1944 The word kamikaze is over 660 years older than Japan's suicide pilots. "Divine wind" was the name given to the typhoons that scattered Kublai Khan's fleets off Japan in 1274 and 1281.
- 1284 Hamelin has a street where music is forbidden.
- 1288 · 1326 The oldest surviving gun is Chinese, made no later than 1288, and weighs 3.5 kg. Europe's first picture of a cannon appears only in Walter de Milemete's English manuscript of 1326.
- 1291 Murano glass exists because of fear of fire.
- 1293 The founder of Majapahit won with the help of Kublai Khan's army, then drove it out. In 1293 Raden Wijaya got the Mongol force on Java to crush his rival, then turned on the Mongols themselves.
- 1294 In 1294 Pope Celestine V resigned five months after his election.