Previously I attempted to make my own glasses from scratch.
The results of my glass however were not the clearest...which kind of spoiled their purpose.
However glass isn’t the only material that can be used in lenses.
In fact most lenses today are made from plastic.
But really, any material that is transparent and refracts light can be used as a lens.
So, since it’s the middle of winter here in Minnesota, I’m going to use a material
that is very plentiful: ice.
Or at least normally it would be, except we’ve had unusually warm weather here lately...so
I’m going to be forced to use my freezer.
The biggest challenge with this that I will be facing however, is making clear ice.
As ice freezes, air often gets trapped inside as bubbles, giving it a cloudy and opaque
appearance.
Ironically, these trapped air bubbles was a similar issue I faced with my glass, and
is part of why it also wasn't clear.
For making clear ice, I’m attempting a variety of methods.
I’m going to try using distilled water so there are no impurities, boiling it multiple
times to remove any air bubbles, various shapes and molds, and a couple techniques to make
it freeze in a specific direction.
But while I let those freeze and find out what worked best, I also wanted to try a different
type of vision correction that a few people mentioned in the comments: pinhole glasses.
Using some of the leftover wood from before...which you’ll be seeing a lot of in the future
since I have a whole tree leftover, I made a new set of glasses with solid wood lenses.
Then I drilled a bunch of holes into it.
The science behind pinhole lenses is kind of interesting, in that it’s a different
technique to correct vision.
Because light bounces around everything, if it just hit your retina, you would see a blurred
combination of all light.
The lens of the eye corrects for this by bending the incoming light to a single point on your
retina.
Various errors to the eye’s lens can cause different eye problems, which glasses then
correct for.
However instead of bending the light to correctly hit your eye at a single point, the pinhole
eyeglass work by just blocks all light except those coming from a single direction.
This producing a much darker and narrow image, but allows the same pinhole glasses to work
for nearly everyone, whether near or far sighted.
Now that I've made those glasses, let's check on my ice
Many of my attempts were pretty unsuccessful.
The best methods I found were ones that force the ice to freeze in a single direction, forcing all the air to one spot.
By using a salt-ice water bath in the fridge, I was able to force the ice to freeze from
the bottom up.
However a fair amount of bubbles were still trapped.
The method I had best success with was using a cooler with the lid removed in the freezer.
This froze from the top down, resulting in a cloudy bottom layer, but the top layer was
very clear: perfect for my lenses.
Then I just needed to cut the ice to the correct size, and shape them.
How much a material bends the light is measured as the “refractive index” of a material,
with 1.0 being no refraction.
The refractive index of glass is around 1.5, while with ice is 1.31.
This means ice is slightly weaker than glass, so it’ll need a lens with stronger curvature.
Shaping my glass before was a laborious activity involving lots of grinding with various grits
to get the right shape with a clear polish.
With Ice it's a lot easier.
I just found a large spoon with roughly the right curvature I wanted, heated it by filling
it with hot water, and melted the shape into the ice.
That is actually looking pretty good.
This might actually work!
That single concave shape on the one side was pretty close to my prescription, so I
melted the other side flat using the bottom of a pot sitting in a pool of hot water.
Wow, this is like crystal clear. This is better then my glass.
I can see pretty...pretty damn good.
This is definitely a lot better then I thought it would be...awesome!
While making the pinhole glasses, I made another set of frames to attempt to attach the ice
to to make my glasses.
Now lets try these glasses out with a vision test and see how well they do.
First without my glasses i can read
pretty clearly up to about the 20/50 line
"N" "C" "K" "H "D"
so next I'll try with the pinhole glasses
alright this is kind of weird but actually
works pretty good I can read at least
the 20/25 line. Actually, probably the 20/20 too.
"C "R" "Z" "S" "K"
very disorientating because I'm looking through a bunch of holes.
Kind of takes a little bit of my eyes used to it
but once I kind of settle in and let it
kind of adjust, I can actually see 2020
So that is...surprisingly effective I have to say.
The fact that, it's very disorientating
I always see the lines between the holes
It also makes things very dark. I doubt I can
use these at night
Well technically improve my vision
enough to do to see 20/20 and be legally able
to drive, these are be incredibly
dangerous because I have like no
peripheral vision. Like, I can't see my
hands right now and then for reference i
have the glasses I polished out of glass
themselves and even with this
right now I can read 20/20.
These are definitely good, my peripheral vision is not
super great, it's very distorted but
honestly I would feel safe driving with these
Definitely better than the pinhole or without.
Alright, so my original plan
was to get these attached to the
frames, melt them into shape and everything
But they are way too volatile and I actually dropped one,
broke it, and had to reshape a new one
So here we go
They've become a little distorted,
just from the melting of getting them here but
I'd say I can read...I can read 20/20 "C" "R" "D" "S" "K" s.k yeah so when
When I first had these made they were like crisp like
perfect lenses perfectly round but
since then they've melted inconsistently
and they are about to fall off, and now
now they are a little bit distorted, but they work, they
actually work
there goes a lens. Now they don't work
So to answer the question: can you make lenses out of ice?
the answer is yes but should you?
probably not. they are incredibly impractical but
it is possible -and there goes the other lens.