Leonardo da Vinci is often given credit for first introducing the idea of the contact lens in 1508. He didn’t suggest his idea be used for correcting vision, though. He used the idea to better understand the mechanisms of accommodation of the eye. In 1801, Thomas Young made a basic pair of contact lenses on the model of work done by Descartes. He used wax to affix water-filled lenses to his eyes. This neutralized his own refractive power. He then corrected for it with another pair of lenses.
It wasn’t until 1887 that a German glassblower, F.E. Muller, produced the first eye covering to be seen through and tolerated. In 1887, the German ophthalmologist, Adolf Gaston Eugen Fick, constructed and fitted the first successful contact lens. While working in Zurich, he described fabricating afocal scleral contact shells, which rested on the less sensitive rim of tissue around the cornea and experimentally fitting them initially on rabbits, then on himself, and lastly on a small group of volunteers. These lenses were made from heavy blown glass and were 18–21 millimeters in diameter.
Fick filled the empty space between cornea/callosity and glass with a dextrose solution. He published his work in March 1888. Fick's lens was large, unwieldy, and could only be worn for a couple of hours at a time. August Muller in Kiel, Germany corrected his own severe myopia with a more convenient glass-blown scleral contact lens of his own manufacture in 1888.