Frank Dickinson (1906-1978)
Frank Dickinson was born in Blackpool and spent most of his optical life in St Anne's, Lancashire. He travelled extensively and on his second trip to the US in 1939 to meet transatlantic contact lens pioneers such as Obrig and Feinbloom, he encountered Keith Clifford Hall. Dickinson wrote the more technical aspects of their joint book on contact lenses published in 1946.
In 1948 he visited South Africa and moved there with the family in 1949, becoming the country's first contact lens practitioner. The climate, unfortunately, did not suit his family so they returned to Lancashire in 1950. He was a talented artist and as well as being a church organist was a fine pianist in a variety of styles. In addition, he was a popular lecturer and after dinner speaker.
Dickinson is probably best known for the Microlens, which was a result of international co-operation. He had been working on making lenses smaller and thinner and found, at the 1951 Congress of the International Optical League, that his old friends John Neill from the US and Wilhelm Sšhnges from Germany had similar ideas. They agreed to co-operate in their research and the Microlens, a term coined by Dickinson's wife Muriel, was the result in 1953.
The lens, made from PMMA, was 9.50mm in diameter with a single posterior curve and a very small edge bevel. It was fitted some 0.2 to 0.3mm flatter than flattest 'K' and was very much smaller and thinner than anything that had previously been available. The three-way collaboration also resulted in the foundation of the International Society of Contact Lens Specialists. Later enhancements to the back-surface design and modern gas-permeable materials have given us the hard lens of today.
Dickinson was president of the British Optical Association in 1961-1962 and received an honorary MSc from Bradford University in 1972. He had been awarded the first Herschel Medal from the ISCLS in 1957 and is now remembered by the Frank Dickinson Collection of contact lenses in the BOA Museum in London and the suite named after him in the Optometry Department at UMIST.
Keith Clifford Hall (1910-1964)
Keith Clifford Hall was born in Cambridge and educated in Surrey. He left school at 17 and soon after happened upon a job advertisement for an optician's apprentice in Bracknell. He studied for his FSMC at night school, qualifying in 1931.
Clifford Hall began fitting contact lenses in 1934 and set up the first UK specialist contact lens practice in 1945 at 139 Park Lane in London. He soon moved to larger rooms next door and here he saw patients from all over Britain as well as from other parts of the world. His technique used scleral fitting shells which were modified with wax prior to machining. He also worked with the original Touhy corneal lens.
Clifford Hall met Frank Dickinson in 1939 on board the Queen Mary on his first trip to the US to visit Theodore Obrig. They collaborated on the first UK book on contact lenses in 1946, apparently written over the course of a single weekend spent in the Lake District. Clifford-Hall wrote the more practical chapters.
He made two more visits to the US where he learned various American methods of contact lens fitting. He also visited numerous other contact lens laboratories and clinics around the world, including those in Germany, Brazil and Russia. He was a regular visitor to practices in Norway and Denmark, fitting lenses and teaching fitting techniques to the local ophthalmologists.
Clifford Hall predicted the advent of both soft lenses and disposables as early as 1948. He had planned to visit Otto Wichterle in Prague just before his untimely death 1964. He was awarded the Herschel Gold Medal of the ISCLS in 1958 and was president of the Contact Lens Society in 1963. The Clifford Hall family donated his papers and research notes to the Contact Lens Society which established a memorial collection in the then BOA Library; this is now the BCLA Library at the College of Optometrists. A green plaque was officially unveiled on April 30, 1997, at his old rooms at 140 Park Lane.