Echoes of the Past this week looks back to 1965 this week with a look at the May 14 edition of Optician.
Looking back at old articles predicting how the profession will change in the future is always interesting and allows people to draw comparison with the industry today.
Dispensing Trends of the Future by PJ White on the dispensing essay prize at the Southern Optical Congress for its broad coverage about how dispensing will change. Materials, new techniques and new machines were predicted to have a significant impact.
Dispensers in the future were predicted to be more skilled in taking facial measurements, considering facial contours, planes, and spatial relationships of the skull, orbits and the nose. He or she would also no longer rely on manipulation of stock sizes, but would order frames to fit.
Fashion dispensing was also predicted to be another large growth area, as increased awareness of art among the general public would filter down into different facets of everyday life. It was expected that dispensers would know about these styles and fashions, and the role was particularly suited to women – that preferred dealing with people rather than ideas.
The shape of contact lens dispensing would change in future, with the process carried out by dispensing opticians. ‘It is already a specialised art and today the technical developments are so rapid that, in future, only a man that concentrates on this field will be able to keep up with all the new research as it is published,’ said White.