The Birth of the IOL

In 1948, Mr Harold Ridley, consultant ophthalmologist at St Thomas’ Hospital and Moorfields Hospital, London, together with John Pike of the Rayner Company met privately to discuss a new project.

Pike, a director of Rayner and their senior optical specialist, had assisted Ridley with several projects, most recently on the development of electronic ophthalmoscopy. Ridley called his new project the artificial lenticulus project and asked Pike for Rayner’s help in the design and manufacture of an implantable lens.

In David Apple’s article from the January 1996 issue of Survey of Ophthalmology, Ridley recalls ‘...After months of secret thought, I called my friend John Pike, the optical scientist at Rayners of London with whom I had recently worked on electronic ophthalmoscopy. I suggested that we meet in my car after completing our routine duties that day. So it came about that two men sitting in a car in Cavendish Square one evening devised all the principles of a new operation.’

Perspex was chosen as the preferred material because of its lightness in weight and good optical properties. Also observations during the war of eye injuries to RAF personnel had shown that Perspex appeared inert within body tissues. These observations were reported at an early stage to Dr John Holt of ICI. The post war commercial development of Perspex had resulted in a quite different material from that of the war years but, to ICI’s credit, they once again produced the high quality fighter aircraft Perspex which they called Transpex I.

On the 29th November 1949, at St Thomas’ Hospital, London, Ridley performed the first IOL operation on the eye of a 45-year-old female patient. The operation was done in two stages with the artificial lens permanently implanted three months later.

Perspex was registered in 1934 by ICI as the trademark for their polymethylmethacrylate acrylic sheet. In the late 1930‘s, as a result of Britain’s rearmament programme, ICI’s total production of Perspex was reserved for the aircraft industry and the material was specifically developed for the use of fighter aircraft.

The required properties of transparency, strength and resistance to heat demanded a high degree of purity and polymerisation.

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