These very rare spectacles were designed for people with very short sight by the French optical inventor Jean Gabriel Augustin Chevalier in 1807. They are first recorded in the Gazette de Sante published in the April of that year. Not many were produced as they performed a function that a single lens could normally perform. They were still available in the Chevallier catalogue of November 1820, the drawing recorded does not show the adjustment screw. This instrument was the forerunner of opera glasses which were introduced in 1825.