Making Eyes

In Earle Stanley Gardner's whodunit, The Case of the Counterfeit Eye, a San Francisco eyemaker named Sidney O. Noles solved an optical mystery. Readers who looked up Noles's name in the San Francisco telephone book found it. No fictional character, Eye-Maker Noles sells glass eyes at $10 to $20 apiece, says the detective story was the best advertising he ever had.

Lately Noles has begun making artificial eyes from plastic (Chicago's Mager & Gougelman also make them). Reason: glass-eye glass came from Germany and supplies were dwindling. Now he has decided that plastic eyes (material is similar to that used in dental plates) are better than glass eyes anyway. Advantages: 1) they are not breakable--Noles illustrates this by bouncing a plastic eye on the floor, catching it on the rebound without a scratch; 2) the softer plastic is more "sympathetic" than glass to the tissues around the eye; 3) plastic eyes look more natural than glass eyes because they reflect less light; 4) plastic eyes do not explode (glass eyes sometimes do, from changes in temperature); 5) plastic eyes keep their color and stay shiny longer than glass eyes (unlike glass eyes which are usually put in water overnight, they are often worn constantly, get little handling). Price: $60.

Eyemaker Noles says that plastic eyes will soon be big business. He figures that one in 500 U.S. citizens wears or needs an artificial eye, that returning soldiers will swell the total.

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