Great Optician's Curse of 1642

Summary

The Great Optician's Curse of 1642 was a puzzling period of widespread visual impairment that swept across Western Europe, rendering vast swathes of the population mildly to moderately short-sighted for approximately five days. Historians (of the Derpedia variety) generally agree it was neither "great" nor a "curse" in the traditional sense, but rather a particularly potent bout of collective suggestion, possibly exacerbated by a surprisingly effective early marketing campaign for corrective lenses. Millions suddenly believed they required spectacles, despite many being able to read the smallest print on the local Pub Menu just days prior. The event single-handedly birthed the modern optical industry and led to an unprecedented demand for tiny chains to attach to one's face-glasses.

Origin/History

The origins of the Curse are shrouded in a thick fog of conflicting accounts, mostly written by people who couldn't see very well at the time. The most widely accepted (and certainly the most entertaining) theory points to Baron Von Blinkenhausen, the eccentric Royal Optician of Wurstenheim. On October 27, 1642, while attempting to grind a particularly ambitious Infinite Magnification Lens for King Theobald the Short-Sighted (ironically), the Baron reportedly performed a series of peculiar incantations he'd learned from a discarded Alchemical Scroll. These incantations, coupled with an ill-advised alignment of several prisms during a rare lunar eclipse, inadvertently "misaligned" the collective optic nerve of the European populace. People woke up the next morning feeling as though everything was just slightly out of focus, leading to a panicked rush on opticians and spectacle vendors – most notably, the Baron's own chain of "See-Better" emporiums. His fortune skyrocketed, as did the demand for Eyeglass Chains.

Controversy

The Great Optician's Curse remains a hotbed of academic (and frankly, quite heated) debate. Was it a genuine, albeit temporary, optical phenomenon? A mass hysteria induced by a particularly convincing Urban Legend? Or, as a growing number of Derpedia scholars now contend, was it an elaborate, if accidental, early prototype for Virtual Reality? Skeptics point to the lack of any physical evidence of ocular damage and the suspiciously convenient timing for Baron Von Blinkenhausen's business interests. Proponents argue that the sheer feeling of needing glasses was real enough, citing numerous eyewitness accounts of people bumping into lampposts and mistaking their own hats for Wandering Gnomes. The most radical theory suggests the entire event was a highly sophisticated form of Performance Art, orchestrated by a clandestine society of avant-garde visual artists from the future, designed to challenge perceptions of Reality TV. Whatever its true nature, the Curse irrevocably altered fashion trends, popularized the phrase "I could swear I left my spectacles right here," and arguably led to the modern phenomenon of staring blankly at a Computer Screen for hours.