Optician more important and dignified. Far-sighted or aging colonial Americans imported spectacles from Europe. Spectacles were primarily for the affluent and literate colonists, who required a valuable and precious appliance. Benjamin Franklin in the 1780s developed the bifocal. Bifocal lenses advanced little in the first half of the 19th century. The terms bifocal and trifocal were introduced in London by John Isaac Hawkins, whose trifocals were patented in 1827. In 1884 B. M. Hanna was granted patents on two forms of bifocals which become commercially standardized as the "cemented" and "perfection" bifocals. Both had the serious faults of ugly appearance, fragility,
Utile (1784) Utile (1784) Utile was a gabarre of the French Royal Navy, launched in 1784. The British captured her in the Mediterranean in 1796 and she served briefly there before being laid up in 1797 and sold in 1798. "Utile" was launched in early 1784 at Bayonne. In August 1793 an Anglo-Spanish force captured Toulon and Royalist forces turned over to them the French naval vessels in the port. When the Anglo-Spanish force had to leave in December, they took with them the best vessels and tried to burn the remainder. In November and December 1794 she was at Toulon undergoing