George Mayerle

This multilingual eye-test chart, published in 1907, was the creation of the optometrist George Mayerle (ca. 1870–1929), a “Graduate German Expert Optician” who set up shop in San Francisco in the mid-1890s. Optometry was professionalizing at the time, and Mayerle was on board. A charter member of the American Optometric Association at its founding in 1898, a decade later (not long after the eye chart appeared) Mayerle delivered a lecture on “The Progress of Optical Science” at a national conference of opticians. Typically, professionalizers were anxious to make a distinction between certified, licensed expert practitioners and undiplomaed marketers of nostrums and products. But Mayerle straddled the line. If he saw himself as a scientific practitioner, he was also right at home in optometry’s peddler tradition, selling a variety of products to a national market, including “Mayerle’s Diamond Crystal Eye Glasses” and “Mayerle’s Eyewater,” which he pitched as “the Greatest Eye Tonic” and sold by mail order and in drugstores. - National Library of Medicine