ABSTRACT
The first practicable soft lens was developed by the Czechoslovak chemist Otto Wichterle (1913-98) at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1965, the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences sold the licence for the patent of the invention and its manufacturing to the United States. In 1982, The Economist described the case of the soft contact lens as one of the ‘most celebrated east-to-west transfers of technology’.1
