As
you make the first search of the day, Google's Doodle features a pair of brown
and blue eyes taking on the famous chart. It
is google’s way of celebrating the 181st birthday of the man whose
name hidden among the letters !! .. .. heard of dioptre or of Monoyer ? Anyone who's ever paid a visit to the
optometrist will be familiar with the test showing a series of letters which
gradually decrease in size.
In the
Tamil movie, Jambavan featuring Prashanth, Meera Chopra and Meghna Naidu, Vivek
plays a Doctor trying to do service in village.
In a comedy scene, the village don comes to him – Vivek tries testing
his vision, would write a normal lettered
‘அ’ and gradually increases
its size (அ அ அ அ அ அ அ அ ) – and every time the man says ‘cannot see; cannot read’ - at some point, Vivek gets so angered that
he takes the blackboard closer and asks the Q and gets the same answer. To an enraged Vivek, the man would coolly say
that he has never had education and hence could not recognize even the first letter of mother- tongue.
Visual acuity (VA)
commonly refers to the clarity of vision. Visual acuity is dependent on optical
and neural factors, i.e., the sharpness
of the retinal focus within the eye, the
health and functioning of the retina, and the sensitivity of the interpretative
faculty of the brain. A dioptre is a unit of measurement of the optical power
of a lens or curved mirror, which is equal to the reciprocal of the focal
length measured in metres (that is, 1/metres). It is thus a unit of reciprocal length.
The usage was proposed by French
ophthalmologist Ferdinand Monoyer in 1872, based on earlier use of the term
dioptrice by Johannes Kepler.
Today, Google is celebrating the birthday of the man
who invented the eye test with an animated Doodle. The man, Ferdinand Monoyer
was born in Lyon, France, on May 9th in 1836. He is famous for having introduced a
unit of measuring optical power known as the dioptre. The opthalmologist also
gave the name to the Monoyer chart.
The method for
testing how well we are able to see without the help of glasses hasn't changed
a great deal in over a century. It follows a basic principle: read from rows of
gradually shrinking letters until you're unable to distinguish the shapes any
more. From this, opthamologists can determine people's clarity of vision. The
most well known test is the Snellen chart. It was introduced around the same
time as a rival test called the Monoyer chart. Named after its creator
Ferdinand Monoyer, the Monoyer chart was designed more than 100 years ago and
was the first eye test to use a decimal system.
Today, on what
would be Monoyer's 181st birthday, he has been honoured with a Google
Doodle. Monoyer grew up in Lyon before moving to the
University of Strasbourg in 1871. He eventually returned to Lyon, were he died
aged 76 in 1912.
Telegraph UK adds
the following interesting facts : A human eye weighs approximately 28g, is
2.5cm wide and has six muscles; they hardly grow from the time when you're born; Eyes
can only see the colours red, blue and green. They make all others from these
three; they can spot around 50,000 shades of grey; the average blink takes one
tenth of a second and people blink
around 12 to 17 times per minute. It takes an eye 48 hours to heal a scratch; the
muscle that controls the eye is the most
active in the body
Interesting ! ~
when was the last time, you had your eyes checked ??
With regards – S.
Sampathkumar
9th May
2017.
No comments:
Post a Comment