Wichterle - women's

One of the most brilliant Czech scientists and inventors, to whom we owe contact lenses, but also nylon. Otto Wichterle may not have won the Nobel Prize, but that does not detract from his genius. The collage for our T-shirts was created by Ukrainian student Nastya Filipenko as part of a Czech art competition. Otto Wichterle was born in 1913 and came from Prostějov. As a child, his fate was tilted when he almost drowned in a pool of urine and suffered a shock that gave him fevers and forced him to study at home. When he entered the gymnasium at the age of nine, he was the smallest and youngest of all. But he graduated with honours and entered the Faculty of Chemical Engineering at the Czech Technical University in Prague. After earning his doctorate at the university, he worked as an assistant. After the universities closed in 1939, he began working in Zlín for Bata, where he also invented the famous silon. After the war he returned to the university environment, renewing and innovating chemistry teaching, creating scripts and changing the examination system. In 1958 he was dismissed during a political purge and had to leave for the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (CSAV). Wichterl's most famous invention is the contact lens. Despite initial attempts that were not 100% successful, he managed to create the lenses at home in 1961 - using a machine built from a Merkur kit and a motorcycle made from a bicycle and later a gramophone. A licensing deal for the groundbreaking invention was then awarded to American companies. Wichterle supported the Two Thousand Words manifesto in 1968, became an MP, but was persecuted during the normalisation period. After 1989 he received two honorary doctorates in the USA and one at Charles University. He was president of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, and an asteroid bears his name. He loved tennis and gardening. He died in 1998 at his summer residence.