Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display,

just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

History is a lens.

By looking through it, we can examine how we got to where we are today.

There's much to learn from major events or discoveries of the past, and what they can

tell us help us chart our journey from our first steps on Earth to our walk on the moon.

History also allows us to see what went wrong and how we can do things better the next

time around.

It brings things into focus, so to speak, and perhaps the Vikings were looking for some

of that focus when they came across rock crystals in 11th century Sweden.

In 1997, a team of scientists from a university in Germany arrived on the island of Gauteland

off the coast of Sweden to study the rock crystals the Vikings had left behind.

These weren't like the jagged crystals most people are used to, with pillars of clear

quartz seeming to grow out of the rocks.

Note, these crystals were smooth, impossibly so, and they'd been fashioned into convex,

biospherical lenses, not unlike contact lenses made today.

Except modern contacts and prescription lenses are made in labs by computer guided hardware.

In many cases, one inch thick plastic discs called lens blanks are loaded into machines

that grind and shape them until they're the perfect curvature based on the patient's

prescription.

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