Today we got a new shipment of antique eyeglasses from Europe. These are 14 pairs of genuine vintage round Windsor eyeglasses. The color of these is silver, they are made of some sort of metal, possibly stainless steel. They were never used, New Old Stock (NOS) sometimes also called Deadstock eyeglasses. These were recently found in a factory in the French City of Morez.
According to Wikipedia, Morez is a small commune in Eastern France Famous for the manufacture of vintage and antique eyeglasses. (or as you would say in French Lunettes Vintage or Lunettes antique.) Until about 100 years ago they were also famous for manufacturing grandfather clocks.
The legend in Morez is that in 1796 a nail smith had the idea to create a pair of antique spectacles out of a single nail. Whether this legend is true or not isn’t clear but we do know that the City of Morez became the center of vintage eyeglasses manufacturing in France, “lunettes vintage”, and remains so until today with 60 companies and 3500 employees, producing 10 million eyeglass frames annually which is about 55% of eyeglasses manufactured in France annually. They have an eyewear museum with over 2500 vintage eyeglass frames as well as live workshops.
For some reason not known to us yet, most windsor deadstock eyeglasses we get that were manufactured in Europe were silver colored. It is hard to say if that was the more popular color or there are other reasons that the silver ones are more common today.
The US manufactured windsor eyeglasses we get are most often gold colored. The famous “John Lennon glasses” round gold windsor eyeglasses often worn by John Lennon seem to have been US made and were gold tone. Likely 1/10 12k gold filled. (There are many photos of John Lennon wearing eyeglasses. Sometimes he is wearing other styles of vintage eyeglass frames but often he is wearing windsor frames.
The easiest way to tell the difference between US made windsor eyeglasses and European made windsor glasses is by the way the temples connect to the front of the frames. The US made antique temples were generally flat with one hole in them, and were “sandwiched” on both sides by the front. The European made ones have a reinforcement behind the flat part that extends to the side of the frames, effectively covering up the flat part of the temples. I will post some photos below.
Another interesting difference between the US made windsor glasses and the European frames was that the European frames were often 1/20 10k or 12k gold filled whereas the US ones were generally 1/10 12k gold filled. (more about gold filled eyeglasses another time)
The round windsor eyeglass frames we got today came in 2 sizes. 38mm and 42mm. That is the diameter of the actual lens size in millimeters. Stay tuned for more info about sizing of windsor frames and in general how to measure vintage eyeglasses to see if they will fit you.