Originally Posted by Tark

post 1

Sunglasses were originally developed for the courtroom, not the outdoors.
For many years, dating back before the 1400s, judges in China wore quartz lenses colored by smoke so that no one in the courtroom could try to read their expressions and reactions to evidence since their decision in the trial wasn't made known until the end.

Not until the 1930s were sunglasses truly developed to keep out the glare of the sun, when Bausch & Lomb made such glasses for the U.S. Army Air Corps. In the 1960s, Foster Grant made sunglasses hugely popular by associating them with movie stars.