Sale of Incandescent Bulbs to End on Tuesday?

[Swan vs. Edison, lightbulb]

From a cheapie US-edition Encarta, that is. AIUI the UK edition is quite different in this sort of regard. And the Italian edition credits Joseppi-Tomassi Swanisoni.

Reply to
Fevric J. Glandules
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Do keep up, I just did that one up there ^.

Reply to
Fevric J. Glandules

In message , "dennis@home" writes

That would be plain silly

no -

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just down the road from me

varifocals with transitions, scratch resistant lenses in memory metal frames - £100

Reply to
geoff

In clingfilm ?

perve ...

Reply to
geoff

The French edition must have been simple to write.

All that would be required is a template with " was invented by a Frenchman called in and stolen from him by the (delete at random) in .

Reply to
Peter Parry

So no cheaper then.

Reply to
dennis

In message , "dennis@home" writes

From Optical Express ?

Reply to
geoff

In message , geoff writes

Oh, and they fell apart, didn't they Dennis ...

You got a result there then

Reply to
geoff

Reminds me of the Bush quote...

"The French don't even have a word for Entrepreneur!"

(which he didn't really say, sadly)

Reply to
Andrew Gabriel

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Derek Geldard saying something like:

Should have gone to Specsavers...

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Reply to
Grimly Curmudgeon

When I drive on a bright day without dark glasses I get a headache. When my dad was a medic in Norway during the war a big problem was soldiers complaining of a feeling of sand in their eyes. This was due to the sun and the snow. The iris muscles were getting tired. If I read under a dim light I start to blink and my eyes struggle to focus. This tires the little muscles that focus the lens, so they protest, and sometimes my eyes water. Sometimes when I can't find my 'ultra-close-up' glasses I might foolishly attempt to do a bit of very fine work using my normal bifocals. My eyes are then struggling to focus closer than they are really capable of, so again the iris muscles protest. In all these cases the eye is struggling to work under condiitons that it doesn't like, so it tells the brain that it is unhappy. I think the expression 'eyestrain' is a suitable one. The eyes are straining to do something at the limit of their capabilities. I'm not suggesting that the eyes are damaged in any way by this; just that they tell you that they are unhappy.

On a related topic, here's a warning. If ever you get a build up of sticky gunge in the corner of your eye, and possibly a film of it over your pupil, causing blurred vision, get some antibiotics immediately. I had an eye infection and delayed treating it for 48 hours, with the result that my left eye is permanently affected.

Bill

Reply to
Bill Wright

I didn't know you were a specialist in opthalmology. Or did you just compose the above from general knowledge, using your undoubted literary skills to make it sound as if you knew what you were talking about?

It's bullshit man, pure bullshit.

Bill

Reply to
Bill Wright

In message , Bill Wright writes

Of course.

In May 2001 I heard a news bulletin on my car radio that made me find a lay-by to collect my reeling thoughts because my memories had been sent hurtling back nearly half a century. I?d just heard that Sir Harold Ridley, FRS, the pioneer of intraocular artificial lens implants into the human eye, had just died at the age of 95.

_Sir_ Harold Ridley? Not only was I unaware that he was still alive up until then, but I didn?t know that he was a Fellow of the Royal Society and he had been knighted. Which made me feel utterly wretched because I owed him so much:

My sight.

Dr Harold Ridley was more than a pioneer of implanting artificial lenses in the eye to replace natural lenses damaged by injury or disease; he invented the technique during World War II and carried out the first successful implants just after the war. His battle to get his ideas accepted by his sceptical contemporaries caused him to sink into the depths of black despair. Many of the vitrolic objections to his revolutionary ideas were so vicious ?- some making vehement demands that he be struck off.

In the early days of WWII as an eye specialist in London he treated many injured fighter pilots whose eyes had been damaged by splinters from the canopies of their aircraft.

What puzzled him was that in some cases, although their eyes were damaged by the splinters, often severely, the eye did not react to the presence of the splinters. The lack of inflammatory reactions could make location of tiny particles of glass very difficult. In one instance he had a young Spitfire pilot patient with a cornea damaged by an embedded particle of glass yet there were no sign of any inflammation of the cornea whatsoever. Anyone who has had even a tiny particle of grit in the eye knows just how sensitive the cornea is to foreign bodies.

Much mystified as to why the eyes of fighter pilots reacted in different ways Dr Ridley did some research, even to the extent of poking about in wrecked aircraft, and discovered that the canopies of Spitfires were made of a new plastic -- acrylic -- known as Plexiglas in America, Perspex in Britain. And it was injured Spitfire pilots whose eyes did not react to the presence of this new plastic.

He theorised that maybe the human eye was tolerant of the presence of acrylic? His colleagues were incredulous that an eye surgeon should expound such a ludicrous idea. In some ways they were right: even a small particle of any material making contact with the cornea causes intense irritation.

Dr Ridley suspected that the problem lay with the hyper- sensitive epithelium of the eye -- the outer layer of the cornea. His observations confirmed his suspicions and he began to think he was onto something.

In those early days of antibiotics, it was often necessary to remove the lens (needling) in a damaged eye to prevent the spread of infection. (Dr Ridley performed this operation on my accident- damaged left eye in 1952). Without a lens, light falling on the retina is unfocussed. The patient can discern where a window is in a room but that's about all. A patient with both lenses wrecked, as happened to many pilots, was effectively blind. The lenses are particularly vulnerable -- susceptible to all manner of problems such as clouding -- necessitating their removal to avoid total blindness. Millions of people all over the world were virtually blind.

Undeterred by ridicule and sulphurous abuse, Dr Ridley recovered a shard of Perspex canopy from a crashed Spitfire and spent hours with the help of his wife, Elizabeth, fashioned an artificial lens from acrylic. It took many attempts with the strange new material before he managed to make what he considered to be a near-perfect lens. He could not perform an implant on a human but a pig? A pig was a different matter...

Under conditions of great secrecy and with help of a vet he implanted an acrylic lens in a pig's eye and covered the animal?s good eye with a patch.

With great trepidation Dr Ridley and Elizabeth watched the animal the following morning. To their joy the pig made a perfect recovery and contentedly rooted about, seeking food. Of course, Dr Ridley could not publicise the results of his bold experiment, but he could theorise about the possibility of such an operation being performed. That's when the howls of derision from many of influential colleagues turned ugly. There were demands that he be struck off and even some that he should recant like Galileo.

"Goddamn it, Ridley! We're supposed to remove foreign bodies from the eye, not put them in!"

It was a black period in Dr Ridley's life but, with the tremendous support of his wife, he stuck to his idea and eventually was allowed to perform the world's first intraocular (cataract) operation at St Thomas Hospital, London in 1950. It was a resounding success. There's now a plaque at St Thomas's to commemorate the event. His work was followed up with great eagerness in America. But matters were a slower in England. He was not knighted for his remarkable achievement until 2000 -- half a century after he performed the world's first cataract operation, and a year before his death.

Since then an estimated four hundred million people world wide owe their sight to Harold Ridley.

I remember him as a warm, friendly man with a slight speech impediment. To my shame, I likened him to Richard Herne's popular TV comic character at the time, Mr Pastry. It was very wrong of me but I was only 13. His prompt action saved my right eye, but he had to remove the lens from the more severely damaged left eye to stop infection spreading.

There was too much damage to my left eye for Dr Ridley to perform a cataract operation. His cheery parting words were to come back in ten years. It was not until 2000 that the operation could be performed by Prof David Gartry and so gave me what he called: 'RAF vision? by inserting the lens under the cornea and in front of the iris. The lens is equipped with tiny hooks to prevent it rotating. Not really a problem because there's no such thing as eyestrain.

In 2004 I was able to go some way towards repaying my huge debt to Harold Ridley in a novel which I dedicated to him. The novel was called Return of the Eagles. Severn House ISBN 0 7278 61336. It was set immediately after WWII. One of episodes told the story of a blinded German PoW who wanted to stay in England rather than be repatriated home because he had heard about Harold Ridley?s work. The story was a work of fiction but the background material I used about Dr Ridley?s work was accurate.

A movie entitled FIGHT FOR SIGHT is awaiting a green light. I don't suppose it'll happen because it's all Follett bullshit, man! Hurricanes and Spitfires! What utter tosh! All Follett's lies and bullshit!

Reply to
james

Don't be daft Geoff, Dennis only does 29mph in the middle lane of a motorway.

Reply to
The Medway Handyman

Yebbut is anyone else moaning to the bbc for publishing faulty information?

Reply to
AlanG

But he is clever enough to have said it, if only he could pronounce it.

Reply to
AlanG

More specifically it was radiation damage to the eye and nothing to do with strain or the muscles in the eye. In extreme cases you go blind. This is why you have to wear filters when skiing, etc.

Its far more likely that you stop blinking as frequently as you should and the eye dries out. You get exactly the same effect on computer monitors and they are generally bright.

Reply to
dennis

I owe that man a big thank you. I developed a cataract in the 1980's and had it operated on in the late nineties. That eye is now my best pal, as far as sight goes. It has suffered a detached retina, but that was sorted by his successors last year. :-)

Dave

Reply to
Dave

Still can't find the bloody delete key, can you?

Reply to
Fevric J. Glandules

[snip long irrelevant but skilfully told story about being a patient, no different to so many of us. By gum James you can't half spin 'em!]

So you aren't an expert then? I didn't think so.

Bill

Reply to
Bill Wright

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