FMO: Looking back over century

As FMO celebrates exactly 100 years since its founding as the Association of Wholesale and Manufacturing Opticians (AWMO) in March 1917, it is timely to reflect on the huge progress that has been made in the UK ophthalmic industry in a relatively short space of time.

In the early 1900s almost every pair of spectacles was handmade to order for each patient. AWMO was founded to represent the industry at a time when the era of the craft of spectacle making was drawing to an end as the industrial revolution had facilitated the introduction of mass-production techniques for producing spectacle frames and lenses. And there were instrument innovations too, with the first hand-held direct illuminating ophthalmoscope, invented in 1915, enabling ophthalmoscopy to become one of the most ubiquitous medical screening techniques in the world today. But in the aftermath of the First World War, UK manufacturers complained bitterly that German manufacturers’ costs were a third of their own, and those in the US were 68 per cent lower, creating unfair competition in home and export markets.