History
The principle behind the illusion was first patented in 1909 by Fred J. Wiedenbeck (Patent #914904)
X-Ray Specs were improved (Patent# 3592533) by Harold von Braunhut, also the inventor of Amazing Sea-Monkeys.
A previous product called the Wonder Tube worked in a similar way. Instead of glasses, the device was in the form of a small telescope.
Their name was used as the inspiration for the UK punk band The X-Ray Spex.
Read more about this topic: X-Ray Specs (novelty)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)
“... the history of the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a process of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher.”
—Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)
“Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.”
—G.M. (George Macaulay)