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:
“We noticed several other sandy tracts in our voyage; and the course of the Merrimack can be traced from the nearest mountain by its yellow sand-banks, though the river itself is for the most part invisible. Lawsuits, as we hear, have in some cases grown out of these causes. Railroads have been made through certain irritable districts, breaking their sod, and so have set the sand to blowing, till it has converted fertile farms into deserts, and the company has had to pay the damages.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.”
—Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)
“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)