Digging deeper, the invention of eyeglasses is an elaboration of the more fundamental development of optics technology. The ability of a segment of a glass sphere to magnify whatever is placed before it was known around the year 1000, when the spherical segment was called a reading stone,[…].

The conditions of the old-time Salisbury hill-farm, which fed its owners on its spare-ribs and corn meal, and sweetened their taste with the crystallized sap of its maples, and which reckoned a man with a savings-bank account and a hundred stonewalled and unmortgaged acres forehanded if not positively rich, have ceased to be typical conditions of the American present-day prosperity.

In new suburban wonderworlds, psychic and social tensions challenged marital togetherness, prompting a new generation of muckrakers to expose the harried lives of affluent Americans.

1971 Individual works are all potential myths, but it is their collective adoption that actualises - if such should be the case - their 'mythicism'. (Levi-Strauss)