Obituary: Sydney Bush

Sydney Bush, who has died in his 90th year, had originally chosen to spend his life in medical practise and reached his second MB before switching and becoming the fourth generation of his family to pursue a career in optics. His life spanned the profession’s development, from chemist and jeweler opticians before the NHS existed, into ophthalmic optics and ‘optometry’.

He was an innovator, embracing variable focus lenses as soon as Essilor started production, and then developing his own reduced aberration designs. Anisometropia and convergence insufficiency were particular areas of interest, leading to his development of the Bush bicentric lens, line free slab off prism designs, and special base in prism-controlled bifocals.