structural:expansion
Other claims

The 17th-century claim by Francesco Redi that Salvino degli Armati of Florence invented eyeglasses in the 13th century has been exposed as erroneous.

Marco Polo is mistakenly claimed to have encountered eyeglasses during his travels in China in the 13th century. However, no such evidence appears in his accounts. Indeed, the earliest mentions of eyeglasses in China occur in the 15th century and those Chinese sources state that eyeglasses were imported.

In 1907, Professor Berthold Laufer speculated, in his history of glasses, that for glasses to be mentioned in the literature of China and Europe at approximately the same time it was probable that they were not invented independently, and after ruling out the Turks, proposed India as a location. However, Joseph Needham speculated that the mention of glasses in the Chinese manuscript Laufer used "in part" to credit the prior invention of them in Asia did not exist in older versions of that manuscript, and the reference to them in later versions was added during the Ming dynasty.

In 1971, Rishi Agarwal, in an article in the British Journal of Ophthalmology, states that Vyasatirtha was observed in possession of a pair of glasses in the 1520s, he argues that it "is, therefore, most likely that the use of lenses reached Europe via the Arabs, as did Hindu mathematics and the ophthalmological works of the ancient Hindu surgeon Sushruta ", but all dates are given well after the existence of eyeglasses in Italy was established, including significant shipments of eyeglasses from Italy to the Middle East, with one shipment as large as 24,000 glasses, as well as a spectacles dispensary in Strasbourg in 1466.