The Mask of Cool: The Hidden History of Sunglasses - Episode 12

Aleksandra Ganeva: Good question. Why do you put on sunglasses? And I actually want you to think about it for a second before you answer, because the obvious answer to block the sun turns out to be not the whole story, not even close to the whole story. Because here's the thing I want to start with today. The thing that stopped me completely when I first came across it. The very first recorded use of darkened lenses held in front of human eyes had nothing to do with the sun, nothing to do with glare or squinting or . UV protection, the person wearing them was indoors, in a courtroom. And the reason they were wearing them was so that nobody in the room, not the defendant, not the witnesses, not the lawyers, could read their face. Judges in 12th century China wore flat panes of smoky quartz over their eyes during trials, not to see better, to be seen less, to make themselves completely unreadable, to have a face that gave nothing away. Sunglasses were not invented for summer, they were invented for power. And today we're going to follow that idea. The idea of the unreadable face. From a Chinese courtroom in the 1100s, through the Arctic, through the cockpits of World War II fighter planes, through Hollywood, all the way to the pair sitting on your face right now. I'm Aleksandra, welcome to the Hidden Life of Things, everyday history for anyone who's ever looked at something ordinary and wondered, how did this actually get here? Let's stay with the image for a minute because I don't think I gave it quite enough space in the intro and it deserves it. Twelfth century China Song Dynasty. A courtroom, a defendant stands before a judge. Maybe they're nervous, maybe they're lying, maybe they're innocent and they knew it. And they're looking at the judge's face, the way all of us instinctively look at the face of someone who has power over us, trying to read something, any flicker of sympathy, any sign of disbelief, any hint of which way this is going. And they see nothing. Because the judge is wearing flat panes of smoky quartz over his eyes. Smoky quartz is a naturally occurring semi-transparent mineral. It ranges from a pale brownish tint through to deep grey black. A flat piece held in front of the eyes lets enough light through that the wearer can see reasonably well, but from the other side, the eyes are obscured, the expression is gone, the face is composed and neutral and completely unreadable. Now think about why that matters in a courtroom specifically. If you can read a judge. s face, if you can see that a particular argument is landing, or that a witness testimony is making them uncomfortable, or that they're sympathetic to one side, you can use that. You adjust, you push harder on the things that seem to be working, you drop the things that aren't. A readable judge is a judge who can be played. An unreadable judge is much harder to manipulate. The smoky quotes wasn't decoration, it was a judicial tool, a technology for preserving impartiality, a way of making sure the legal process. Was decided by the evidence, not by whoever was best at reading the room. This is documented in Chinese written records of the period. Joseph Needham, the British scientist who wrote a definitive multi-volume work, Science and Civilization in China, which is basically the Bible of Chinese technological history, specifically cites dark glasses worn by Chinese judges to conceal their expressions during court proceedings. The 12th century Song dynasty is the most commonly cited period, and some historians think the practice may even be older. Very few physical objects have survived. Smoky quartz in a frame over 900 years is not a robust combination, but the written record is there. now I want to take you somewhere completely different. Because at almost the same point in history on the other side of the planet, a completely different group of people were putting something dark in front of their eyes for a completely different reason. And their version might actually be older. The Inuit and Yupik people of the Arctic, in what is now Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Siberia, developed eye protection possibly as far back as 2,000 years ago. And they were solving a genuinely life-threatening problem: snow blindness. If you haven't Come across this before, sunlight reflecting off snow and ice carries an extraordinary amount of UV radiation, more sometimes than direct sunlight from above because it's also bouncing back at you from the ground. Prolonged exposure without protection causes what is essentially a sunban on the surface of your eye. Painful, temporarily disabling, and in severe cases capable of causing lasting damage. For people hunting and travelling across Arctic terrain, this wasn't a discomfort, it was a serious danger. Yeah. Their solution was extraordinary. They carved goggles from walrus ivory, antler, driftwood, or bone shaped precisely to fit the contours of a face, and instead of a clear opening for the eyes, they cut a narrow horizontal slit, just wide enough to see through, narrow enough to reduce the light entering dramatically. No lens material at all, just geometry. The shape of the gap did all the work. And here's the unexpected bonus those narrow slits also sharpened vision. The same principle as a pinhole camera, reducing the improves focus. Researchers who have tested working replicas report that they actually improved distance acuity. So the Inuit had simultaneously invented protective eyewear and a vision sharpening tool from materials they around them, with no formal optical theory and no knowledge of what was happening in 12th century Chinese courtrooms. There are over a hundred pairs of these goggles in the Canadian Museum of History alone. They're remarkable objects and they deserve to be known. So you've got two. Two completely different cultures, two completely different problems, survival versus power, arriving at the same basic insight. Put something between your eyes and the world. Control what comes in, control what goes out. That's the whole history of sunglasses, right there in the first thousand years of them. Between the 12th century and what we'd recognize as sunglasses today, there's a long stretch of slow development worth understanding because it explains some things that are otherwise confusing. Corrective spectacles, actual ground lenses to correct vision problems, appear in Europe in the late 13th century, almost certainly in Italy, somewhere around around 1286. For the next few centuries, eyeglasses were entirely about seeing better. Nobody was tinting them. By the 18th century, that started A A British optician named James Ayscough was experimenting with blue and green tinted lenses in the 1750s, not for sun protection, but because he thought certain tints might help specific vision conditions. Therapeutic, not cosmetic. And here is a detail that I love because it's so completely at odds with what sunglasses mean now. In the early 19th century, dark glasses were associated with illness. They were sometimes prescribed for syphilis patients who had developed light sensitivity. For a period, wearing dark lenses in public, read as a Sign that something was wrong with you. The object that would eventually become the universal symbol of health, glamour, and confidence was for a few decades the thing sick people wore. History is full of these complete reversals. By the late 19th century, mass production had made tinted lenses broadly available. They were practical, useful for outdoor workers, people at the beach, people with sensitive eyes, but they weren't fashionable. They weren't cool, they were sensible. And then two things happened that changed everything. People started flying and a war broke out. Early aviation created a completely new visual problem that nobody had anticipated. Above the cloud layer, the light is different. It's intense in ways that don't occur at ground level, coming from above, reflecting off clouds, arriving from multiple directions simultaneously. Early pilots were reporting headaches, reduced concentration, vision problems during long flights. The standard goggles of early aviation fogged up, were too heavy, didn't filter the right frequencies of light. In 1929, a US Army Corps officer named Colonel John McCready went to an optical company called Bosch and Lomb with a specific brief. Design something that actually works for military pilots at altitude. The brief was purely functional. Cut, glare, maintain accurate colour perception, crucial for reading instruments and navigating by landmarks. Don't fog up, don't interfere with equipment. The design that came out of the brief had specific features, all driven by function, not aesthetics. The teardrop shape, larger at the bottom, because pilots look Down at instrument panels and their eyes needed coverage in that position. The green tint, specifically chosen because it reduces glare while keeping colour accuracy. The copper alloy frame because it doesn't interfere with compass readings. The commercial version hit shops in 1937 under the name Ray Ban, because the lenses literally banned rays. That's it. That's the whole brand name. And then in 1944, General Douglas MacArthur waded ashore on a beach in the Philippines. Photojournalism becoming a Mass media, photographs distributed globally, reproduced in newspapers and magazines everywhere. MacArthur was one of the most photographed military figures of the war. And in every photograph from that beach, he was wearing his aviators. That image went everywhere. And after the war, when returning soldiers brought Kit home and military style flooded into civilian fashion, the aviator shape came with them. A functional cockpit tool became a cultural object because of one photograph on one beach. Here's where it comes back to the judge. Early Hollywood had a practical problem. The arc lights and floodlights used on film sets in the 1920s and 1930s were genuinely brutal on the eyes. Actors, directors, crew, dark glasses were physical, relief from the glare. Practical, not glamorous. And then something unexpected happened. Celebrities in the early era of mass media photography faced a problem no previous form of fame had ever produced: the Early press photographers used flashbulbs at close range. repeatedly at every public appearance, genuinely unpleasant. Dark glasses were protection. But there were also something else, something nobody had planned. A face with dark glasses is partially hidden. You can see the person, their smile, their general presence, their posture, but you cannot see their eyes, and the eyes are where most of the emotional information in a human face lives. A face without readable eyes is simultaneously present and absent. There and not quite there. Early stars discovered almost by accident that sunglasses made them more mysterious, more magnetic, more present somehow by being less available. Greta Garbo wore them, Marlene Dietrich wore them, Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany. Created an image so iconic it's still driving oversized frame sales today. James Dean, Marlon Brando in The Wild One, and then Top Gun in 1986, a film that is many things, but is also in retrospect a two-hour commercial for aviator sunglasses, caused Ray-Ban's sales to jump an estimated 40% in the year after release. The object that started as a judicial tool for making a face unreadable had after 800 years become a fashion item whose primary appeal Is making your face unreadable. The judge in 1150 would understand this completely. He just called it authority. We call it cool. The global sunglasses market is now worth around 16 billion dollars a year. Tens of thousands of styles, UV ratings, polarization, photochromic lenses that adjust automatically, mirror coatings, gradient hints. The technology is unrecognizable from a piece of smoky quartz. But watch people actually wearing glasses at a cafe, at an airport, on a beach, and the thing they seem to value most isn't any of that. It's the feeling. The feeling of being slightly behind something, of being able to look at the world without giving the world full access to your face. Of being present in a public space while keeping a small part of yourself private. The Inuit hunter needed to see without being blinded. The Chinese judge needed to be seen without being read. The World War II pilot needed to function in conditions humans weren't built for. the movie star needed to be in public without surrendering to it completely. And you, on your way out the door, sliding them on without thinking, you're doing a version of all of those things at once. A little protection, a little armor, A small portable affordable piece of mystery. The face behind the glasses is yours. Which version of yours, that's up to you. History isn't only in museums. Sometimes it's sitting on your nose, keeping you slightly mysterious. So next time you put on a pair on the way to work, on a beach, at the airport, take one second. You're wearing a descendant of walrus ivory goggles carved on Arctic shores 2,000 years ago. A smoke quartz held in front of a judge's eyes in Song Dynasty China so nobody could read his thoughts during a trial. Of green tinted lenses designed in a New York laboratory for pilots who needed to see above the clouds. Of the photograph of a general waiting onto a beach in the Philippines in 1944 that made one particular shape famous forever. All of that on your face, probably on the way to get a coffee. That's not nothing. If this made you look at your sunglasses differently, perfect, that's what I'm here for. The Hidden Life of Things is on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you listen. A follow or a comment genuinely helps. And if there's someone in your life who takes their sunglasses very seriously, send this to them. Give them something to think about. And here's a little preview for next time. Humans have been competing against each other for as long as there have been humans. And we have been marking the winner with an object for almost as long. But the specific object, the thing we give to champions that we put on shelves and polish and cry over and occasionally sell for extraordinary amounts of money, has a stranger history than you might think. The ancient Greeks gave winners olive branches and ceramic jars of olive oil. The Romans gave crowns of laurel leaves. Somewhere along the way, a German silversmith in the 1770s. Started making something different, a decorated cup, and that cup in various forms spread across the world until it became the universal language of winning. But here's the thing: the very first trophy was not for sport, it was not for excellence, it was made from the armor of defeated enemies, stripped from their bodies on a battlefield and hung on a post to rot in the open air as a warning to anyone who might try again. What does it mean to give someone a trophy? And where did that idea actually come from? I'll see you next week. Stay curious, I'm Aleksandra and I'll talk to you next week.