Ah yes, true.

..lining up lenses. Suddenly the microscope and the telescope entered the world and kicked off huge changes in how we thought about everything.
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I love how chain reactions of shared knowledge can spiral bigger and bigger and change everything.
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Now we know how to spin clear glass into long, fine strands and encode massive amounts of data on it. Fiber optics is the only reason people from the US, Canada, South Africa, the UK, France, Japan, and more, are all comfortably sitting on this thread, chatting and sharing our random experiences and interests. <3

..being welcomed in Venice. They settled there in this brand new city and saw it become a major player in the Adriatic. Venice got tired of all the various glassmakers accidentally burning down their neighborhoods, so they gathered them all up and exiled them, in 1291, a short distance to the island of Murano.
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Information spillover stated happening between all these glass makers and something crazy happened. Glass got WAY better. It finally became clear as crystal. Ever heard of Murano glass?
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We don't know when, but sometime in the next hundred or so years, monks started wearing glass disks on their eyes to facilitate reading manuscripts. Slowly, other literate people wanted spectacles and they gained popularity.
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Guttenberg came along in the early 1400s and adapted an old wine press with moveable type and created the first "printing press" and then everyone wanted spectacles.
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Once more clear glass was available and cheaper, scientists started experimenting with..

@purplepumpkin, welcome back! Of course you're getting upvoted, we need to get you your star.
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I like this random stuff, so I'll contribute too. Steven Johnson wrote How We Got To Now. I really recommend it if you like learning a lot about random stuff. Example:
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26 million years ago, in the Lybian desert, something crazy happened. We don't know what, but we do know it changed a bunch of silicon dioxide from solid crystals to a weird not-solid not-liquid state. The whole stretch of desert was a shimmering sheet of glass.
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Ten thousand years ago, give or take, humans started wandering through there and becoming obsessed with it. King Tut had a scarab beetle with a silver of this glass set in it.
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The Romans figured out how to make vaguely translucent, brownish window panes the stuff, as well as drinking vessels and bottles to hold wine. Not much happened for a while.
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When Constantinople was sacked in 1204, a small community of glassmakers fled in a panic. They ended up...

@xvarnah, or anyone else who's read this far, if you're on the hunt for an excellent twisted sort of comedy show on Netflix, The Good Place is definitely worth checking out.

Taste the rainbow

It depends on the sheriff. I have friends that work in a department here in my area and they would be fired, no question.

Walk it off

The monocles mess with their depth perception

The best kind of...