The First Lady of Optics

They may not have known Glancy’s name, but they carried her innovative lenses with them at work, at play, or behind the wheel of an automobile. But Glancy’s innovations extended beyond eyewear. She developed a breakthrough camera lens—a project requiring 200 pages of handwritten calculations—that helped photographers take sharper, clearer pictures. Experts in the field of television drew on her research in creating larger screens. Her work also contributed to advancements in telescopes, eye exam equipment and military optics.

Yet today, very few people know about Estelle Glancy, even with the field of consumer optics. She isn’t memorialized in any statue or monument. Yet her college roommate Phoebe Waterman Haas, who gave up science a few months after earning her degree in order to get married, has had the observatory at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in her honor.

Haas and Glancy received their doctorates on the same day, the first women in the history of Berkeley to earn PhDs in astronomy, but only Glancy pursued a long career as a scientist. Her roommate Haas focused instead on family and child, but her son became a billionaire, and a family donation earned his mother naming rights at the Smithsonian’s observatory.

In eyewear, she anticipated many innovations long before they entered the marketplace. She filed a patent on progressive lenses in 1923—a half century before these became widely accepted as a superior alternative to bifocals and trifocals. She developed the first lensometer to measure the power of a spectacle lens, now a standard piece of equipment in optical dispensaries.

An article on Glancy from 1948 noted that AO employed five thousand people at the time, but probably only a half-dozen could understand the nature and depth of her research. At the time of her death in 1975 at age 91, Glancy had been retired for almost a quarter of a century. But by then evidence of her impact could be seen everywhere—from the progressive lenses that were finally accepted as the best vision solution for presbyopia to the televisions and other screens at homes and workplaces.