Looks pretty similar except for the location of the clear space.
In other words an early form of sunglasses. The object of my invention is to protect the eye from too strong a light as much as possible, and this I effect by leaving only a small portion of the surface of the glasses polished and surrounding it with a ground space extending to the circumference or outside rim, intended to obstruct the passage of the rays of light and soften their effect upon the eye, leaving that portion opposite the pupil a small clear circular space. The idea caught on for those with “weak” eyes, and in 1839 an American, Charles Jachan, patented a modified version of Martin’s glasses, which he described as follows: The idea goes all the way back to 1756, when a London optician named Benjamin Martin introduced his “ Visual Glasses.” These glasses featured a horn or tortoiseshell rim that restricted the light entering the lenses, and were the first sunglasses. No, they were actually glasses made to shield weaker eyes from excessive light. For one thing they had blue lenses and were goggles rather than glasses, as can be seen from the contemporary sketch of a British officer. While there is ample documentation (and even a few photos) of these glasses, they appear to be quite different than the “sharpshooter glasses” sold as CW issue. It has been suggested that they were actually “sun goggles” issued to British troops in Egypt and the Sudan in the 1880s and 90s. So my conclusion matches theirs – there are no contemporary mentions of such shooting spectacles, and the earliest mentions of commercially available “shooting glasses or spectacles” are not until much later. One has to be careful with negative evidence, but as the authors say, since they were rather unusual you’d expect someone to at least mention them. I have been researching Civil War sharpshooters for about the same length of time (and wrote a book about it) and I have never seen a contemporary mention of them either. Army Heritage and Education Centre at the Army War College asked the curators to search their records – no evidence of Civil War use of shooting spectacles could be found. Extensive searching in newspaper advertisements, optician books and publications, the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, sharpshooter and regimental histories, and many other books, documents and other sources during the last fifteen years have failed to establish the use of this style of glasses by soldiers during or before the Civil War. … there are large numbers of an unusual type of spectacles sold as “Civil War shooting spectacles” or “sharpshooter glasses” on the antique market – indeed, probably more than the total number of sharpshooters in the War. The section we are concerned about starts on page 17, in which they consider the “sharpshooter glasses.” The authors are members of the Ocular Heritage Society and seem quite knowledgeable. I will tell you what they were really used for in a bit.įirst I’d like to recommend an excellent web article on period glasses, or spectacles as they were called then, which I think will be of use to reenactors who are looking to perfect their impression. The answer, unfortunately, is that they are not sharpshooting glasses and in fact have nothing to do with sharpshooting or the Civil War.
Were they actually used, and if so when and where? Usually these are nickeled steel frame spectacles with orange lenses frosted except for a clear spot in the center. Quite a number of books and articles mention sharpshooters (presumably Union & Confederate) using special glasses to gain clearer vision of their intended targets, and at any given time you can find several for sale on Ebay and other outlets, and at Civil War shows.
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