Contact Lens Manufacturing: Wichterle to ABB Robots

One factory in Jacksonville, Florida, makes about 1.7 billion contact lenses a year. Contact lens manufacturing got from hand blown glass shells to that scale in under 150 years, and robots now do parts of the work, from moving wet lenses to placing them in blister packs. This post follows the story from the first glass lenses and a Czech chemist's toy construction kit to the moulding lines of today. It also looks at where ABB robots such as the IRB 360 FlexPicker and the IRB 1300 Clean Room could fit, and at what smart and specialty lenses will ask of factories.

A woman holds a soft contact lens on her fingertip before putting it in, 2002. Photo: Eitan Tal / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

How the first contact lenses were made by hand

Leonardo da Vinci described the idea in his Codex of the eye in 1508, and in 1801 Thomas Young tried a simple water filled lens, but neither was practical. In 1888 Adolf Gaston Eugen Fick became the first to fit contact lenses successfully, using lenses of blown glass. Plastic followed. William Feinbloom made a lens of glass and plastic in 1936, and in 1939 the Hungarian ophthalmologist István Györffy produced the first lens made entirely of plastic. Rigid PMMA lenses, each cut on a lathe, were the main type through the 1960s.

An eye wearing a soft contact lens. Photo: Reinhard Müller / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Soft lenses started in a Prague laboratory. Otto Wichterle and Drahoslav Lím developed a hydrogel called poly HEMA that could absorb up to 40 percent water, and they published their work on hydrogel lenses in 1959. Wichterle then needed a cheap way to make lenses. With a children's Merkur construction kit, a bicycle dynamo and a bell transformer, he built a spin casting machine at home, in which liquid plastic spun in rotating moulds until it set into the shape of a lens. By late 1961 he and his wife Linda had made the first four hydrogel lenses at their kitchen table.

Otto Wichterle's spin casting apparatus built from a Merkur construction kit, at the Merkur museum in Police nad Metují. Photo: JanSuchy / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Output grew quickly. In the first four months of 1962 the Wichterles made 5,500 lenses on improved machines. In 1965 the National Patent Development Corporation bought the American rights and licensed them to Bausch and Lomb, and the FDA approved the Soflens material in 1971. Mass production later moved to moulding, and robots joined the lines early. A Johnson and Johnson patent filed in 1995 describes an Adept One SCARA robot that picks three good lenses at a time from hydration trays and places them into blister packages.

Bausch and Lomb bottles for cleaning contact lenses, with a blue lens retriever and the box they came in. Photo: Jönköpings läns museum / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Inside a contact lens factory today

In August 2026 NewsNation went inside Johnson and Johnson's Acuvue site in Jacksonville, which ships about 90 percent of the Acuvue lenses sold in the United States. A supply chain vice president told the reporters that the plant's robots take the heavy lifting off people's backs and let them focus on problem solving. In June 2026 the company announced more than 1 billion dollars for a new contact lens plant, a distribution centre and new packaging technology in Jacksonville, to be fully running by 2028 and supporting the site's 3,500 existing employees.

Boxes and blister packs of 1 Day Acuvue lenses sold in Japan. Photo: Konomi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Other makers are expanding too. The Singapore Economic Development Board reported on 30 August 2026 that Alcon was marking 20 years in Singapore with an expansion of its Tuas site, and CooperVision announced six new products at the opening of its new global headquarters in early October 2026. Many steps in plants like these are high speed pick and place jobs, the kind ABB's IRB 360 FlexPicker does in food and pharmaceutical packaging. With conveyor tracking and PickMaster software, a delta robot uses a camera to find each part and picks it from a moving belt.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots packing small items into cartons at high speed. Photo: ABB

ABB has not announced a contact lens customer, so any role for its robots here is a possibility. The IRB 1300 comes in a Clean Room version for production areas with strict particle limits, which would suit handling mould halves, lens trays or sealed blister strips. Small cobots such as YuMi or GoFa could load inspection stations or feed cartons on lines that change product often. Spectacle lenses are a related business, and our post on eyeglass lens labs shows how robots already handle them.

An ABB IRB 1300 Clean Room robot handling trays in an enclosed cell. Photo: ABB

What comes next for contact lens production

New materials have changed the product several times. In 1998 Ciba Vision released the first silicone hydrogel lenses in Mexico, which let much more oxygen reach the eye than older hydrogels. Disposable soft lenses mean billions of nearly identical parts, and each one has to be moulded, hydrated, inspected and packed. Smart lenses would add electronics. In October 2026 XPANCEO said it would work with the lens material maker Contamac to build augmented reality contact lenses from materials already used in FDA cleared devices.

Soft contact lenses made from a high oxygen permeability material. Photo: Albarubescens / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

A smart lens with electronics inside needs very different handling from a plain hydrogel lens. Parts have to be placed into the lens material with care, then tested and tracked one by one, and that kind of small, precise assembly looks more like electronics production than packaging. Vision guided robots that find and orient tiny parts are already common in electronics lines. Rigid lenses go the other way: they are still made to order for each patient, so that end of the business depends on lathes and skilled technicians more than on high speed automation.

An ABB FlexPicker cell set up with PickMaster Lite, which links the robot to a camera. Photo: ABB

The open problems are mostly cost and cleanliness. Contact lenses are medical devices, so every new line has to be validated, which makes changes slow and expensive, and particle control limits what equipment can go near open lenses. Plants also need technicians who can run moulding, inspection and robot cells together. Wichterle's toy kit machine is now on display in the Merkur museum in Police nad Metují, a long way from the Jacksonville lines that turn out lenses by the billion.

Another view of Wichterle's Merkur lens machine on display in Police nad Metují. Photo: JAn Dudík / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com