20th Century Eyewear: Evolution of Eyeglasses See all the exhibitions.

The face of manufacturing in America has changed dramatically over the last 100 years. While today's industries are motorized using computers and machines to get the majority of the work done, manufacturers in the past were reliant on laborers, both skilled and unskilled, to produce American products. Documentary photographs taken at the American Optical Corporation in the early 1900s show these early laborers working in an idealized American factory. These photographs were taken to illustrate the evolution of glass and metal into a pair of spectacles.