The Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers is one of the Livery Companies of the City of London, UK.
The Company was founded by a Royal Charter of Charles I in 1629 AD; it was granted the status of a Livery Company in 1809. The Company was empowered to set regulations and standards for optical devices; this was eroded by the Industrial Revolution, after which mechanical advancements made trade restrictions difficult to enforce. The Company acquired the right, however, to set examinations that opticians had to pass before practising. This power was surrendered to the British College of Ophthalmic Opticians (now titled the College of Optometrists) in 1979, who took over the examination of optometrists, and in 1986 power of examination for dispensing opticians was surrendered to the Association of British Dispensing Opticians (ABDO).
Now, the Company supports charities, including Vision Aid Overseas, and research in the field of optics and conducts training and professional development including the two-year correspondence course for optical technicians that has national accredication in the British National Qualifications Framework.
The Spectacle Makers' Company ranks sixtieth in the order of precedence for Livery Companies.
Famous quotes containing the words company, spectacle and/or makers:
“A man should not go where he cannot carry his whole sphere or society with him,Mnot bodily, the whole circle of his friends, but atmospherically. He should preserve in a new company the same attitude of mind and reality of relation, which his daily associates draw him to, else he is shorn of his best beams, and will be an orphan in the merriest club.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The spectacle of misery grew in its crushing volume. There seemed to be no end to the houses full of hunted starved children. Children with dysentery, children with scurvy, children at every stage of starvation.... We learned to know that the barometer of starvation was the number of children deserted in any community.”
—Mary Heaton Vorse (1874–1966)
“All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)