Friday, 24 February 2012

glass eye maker

In a tiny room in a north London suburb, Jost Haas the last glass eye maker.

He holds a glass tube over a bunsen burner, twirling it constantly, blows through the molten glass, and turns it into a sphere.

His patient Dan Light has only one working eye.

Haas uses coloured glass sticks to match the colour of that eye - not just the pattern of the iris, but the red veins of the sclera.

He also has to make the glass eye fit the shape of Dan's bad eye, and there is only one chance to get it right.

 A glass eye is not, as you might think, like a large solid marble. It is a hollow half sphere, a thin shell that fits over the non-working eye, if it is still there. Otherwise it goes over a ball that has been surgically implanted into the eye socket and attached to the eye muscles.

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