From a Visionary English Physicist, Self-Adjusting Lenses for the Poor

By Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, January 10, 2009; A08

OXFORD, England

Joshua Silver remembers the first day he helped a man see.

Henry Adjei-Mensah, a tailor in Ghana, could no longer see well enough to thread the needle of his sewing machine. He was too poor to afford glasses or an optometrist. Then Silver, an atomic physicist who also taught optics at Oxford University, handed him a pair of self-adjusting glasses he had designed, and suddenly the tailor's world came into crystal-clear focus.