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,
1st American Regiment (1783–1784) was raised in Pennsylvania and commanded by Captain Thomas Douglass, who had been an officer in Thomas Proctor's 4th Continental Artillery Regiment from April 1, 1777 to January 1, 1783 and served as a captain in the First American Regiment from August 1784 to October 1785. The organization of the United States Army changed frequently in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century; but on June 1, 1821, the company that had been commanded by Major Doughty in 1784 was designated Company "F," 4th United States Regiment of Artillery. The company retained this designation until 1901. The company received a