The U.S. military first encountered the shortage of glass eyes during the First World War. At the time protective eyewear was scarce, and both civilian and military eye injuries were commonplace. American soldiers during the war suffered often horrific eye injuries from both battle and disease. Artillery was the most frequent cause of battle casualties, often from metal fragments flying in all directions to splinter the eye. Combined with other factors like disease and even consumption of vision-destroying wood alcohol, over eight hundred American soldiers and sailors suffered blindness of one or both eyes. Military eye prosthetics became a necessity.
Prior to the Great War, the German Empire held a near monopoly on the manufacture of glass for optical use in prosthetics, war materials, and objects like microscopes. By 1912 Germany exported just shy of 400,000 pounds of optical glass annually, with roughly 25 percent transported to Britain and the United States. Thus, the allied nations entered the war almost completely dependent on Germany for a strategic material not only for war making, but also for rehabilitative technology
By 1917 the U.S. War Department recognized that they were running dangerously short of glass eyes. To remedy the situation, a number of firms began production, largely from scratch, of glass similar to what their German counterparts produced. Scientists manufactured optical glass in Rochester, New York at Bausch & Lomb, one of the largest contact lens companies today, along with the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company and Spencer Lens Company in Buffalo, New York. Within a year scientists produced roughly 650,000 pounds of glass for the war effort. Through rehabilitation American soldiers blinded in the military underwent surgical enucleation (removal) of the eye, being fitted with a glass eye often painted to match their remaining eye.
Despite these advances, by the time the Second World War broke out, the Army still hadn’t sufficiently prepared for the eventuality of eye wounds. By 1945 ocular casualties accounted for 14,000 due to disease, 3,000 to injury, and just under 3,000 to battle casualty. Ophthalmologists often utilized a tool first introduced during the previous war: the eye magnet. The soldier sat in front of the large magnet that pulled shrapnel out of the eyeball. While some soldiers lost vision in both eyes, more often they lost most or all vision in one eye, and as stories trickled back to the United States, concerned citizens offered aid in a most bizarre fashion.
The image of the blinded veteran of the Second World War triggered sentimental worry among a group of Americans who felt compelled to offer their own eyeballs to “restore vision’ to the heroes of the battlefield.