The daily disposable contact lens
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 13 August 2019
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The contact lens was once a precious and expensive piece of eyewear which had to be looked after and carefully cleaned every night. But that all changed in the 1990s. Ron Hamilton was involved in developing lenses and packaging which could be made so cheaply they could be worn just once and then thrown away. He has been speaking to Ashley Byrne.
Photo: Ron Hamilton (l) with his business partner Bill Seden (r) and their wives with their original contact lens machine. Courtesy of Ron Hamilton.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
| 0:06.8 | searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the |
| 0:11.8 | telly we share what we've been watching |
| 0:14.0 | Cladie Aide. |
| 0:16.0 | Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming. |
| 0:19.0 | Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
| 0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less |
| 0:24.9 | searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds. Hello, you're listening to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:39.0 | I'm Ashley Byrne and today I'm taking you back to the mid-1990s and to an invention that made a small but important difference to millions of lives around the world. |
| 0:49.0 | I've been talking to Ron Hamilton about the birth of the daily disposable contact lens. |
| 0:54.4 | Here's something that contact lens wearers like me have only dreamt of. |
| 0:58.8 | Throw away those expensive cleaning solutions. |
| 1:02.0 | In fact, throw away your lenses at the end of the day. |
| 1:05.6 | In 1993, Ron Hamilton invented a process for creating contact lenses so cheaply they could |
| 1:11.8 | be worn just once and then thrown away. |
| 1:14.7 | We got to the point where, geevars, you can make these things and by making them in that way |
| 1:20.1 | you cut out that operation and that operation and that operation and we've got a lens when I did my |
| 1:25.2 | costings that are going to change the market. |
| 1:28.0 | This is a story of a seemingly simple innovation that benefited millions of a fortuitous encounter with the BBC World Service |
| 1:35.0 | and an intrepid entrepreneur taking on giant health care companies. |
| 1:38.9 | The biggest contact lens manufacturer in the world, they went away and we never heard from them. First of all I'm not an |
| 1:43.7 | optician, I'm an engineer. I didn't realize we were frightening them. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.