Penrhyn Francis Thomas 1918-2010.

Contact lens pioneer, Penrhyn Thomas, died on 2 May 2010, while living independently at the age of 91 years in Menai, Sydney, with his wife Trish. He was among the first contact lens practitioners in Australia and perhaps foremost in encouraging optometrists to fit contact lenses as a routine part of optometric practice. He was a driving force in the development of corneal lenses. Pen Thomas was born on 25 October 1918 in Pymble, NSW. His father was Welsh, born near Penrhyn in North Wales, from which we can presume came Pen Thomas’s name. His father had immigrated to Australia in 1882 and married into the Badgery family, who were 18th Century free settlers with properties in New South Wales and Queensland and who were prominent in public affairs. At high school, Pen exhibited aptitude in technical skills and drawing, the former being a building block for his career in optometry and the latter the basis for his leisure in later life. Pen studied optometry at the Sydney Technical College and graduated with his Associateship of the Sydney Technical College (ASTC) in 1939. He later obtained his BSc in optometry from the University of New South Wales in 1956. He became a Fellow of the American Academy of Optometry in 1968. Initially, he practised in Kogarah in the southern suburbs of Sydney, before establishing his practice in the central city. He married and grew a moustache to present a more mature image to his patients. Almost immediately, he embarked on fitting contact lenses. Following the lead of WG Kett, an esteemed optometric leader of the day, he fitted Zeiss glass haptic lenses at a time when very few optometrists did so. In Melbourne, the only optometrist known to be fitting contact lenses was Ernst Goetz, who fitted glass haptic lenses from the late 1920s. Plastic and corneal contact lenses were yet to be invented. Penrhyn Thomas C L I N I C A L A N D E X P E R I M E N T A L