Monocle

This style was popular at the beginning of the 20th century as the lens could be cut to fit any shape eye orbit inexpensively, without the cost of a customized frame.

A once-standard comedic device exploits this: an upper-class gentleman affects a shocked expression in response to some event, and his monocle falls into his drink or smashes to pieces on the floor.

This is due in large part to advances in optometry which allow for better measurement of refractive error, so that glasses and contact lenses can be prescribed with different strengths in each eye.

[citation needed] Such women included Una Lady Troubridge, Radclyffe Hall, and Weimar German reporter Sylvia von Harden; the painting Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia Von Harden by German expressionist painter Otto Dix depicts its subject wearing a monocle.

Monocle wearers have included British politicians Joseph Chamberlain, his son Austen, Henry Chaplin, and Angus Maude.

Percy Toplis (The Monocled Mutineer), Astronomer and The Sky at Night Presenter Sir Patrick Moore, founder of Pakistan Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Portuguese President António de Spínola, filmmakers Fritz Lang and Erich von Stroheim, 19th-century Portuguese writer Eça de Queiroz, Soviet writer Mikhail Bulgakov, actor Conrad Veidt, Dadaists Tristan Tzara and Raoul Hausmann, esoteric-fascist Julius Evola, French collaborationist politician Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson, singer Richard Tauber, diplomat Christopher Ewart-Biggs (a smoked-glass monocle, to disguise his glass eye), Major Johnnie Cradock, actors Ralph Lynn, George Arliss and Martyn Green, and Karl Marx.

The English author, Evelyn Waugh, used a monocle when he was in the Army during World War II and needed to focus his vision using a rifle at a shooting range during his initial training.