Almanac: The eye chart 01:48. And now a page from our "Sunday Morning" Almanac, January 18th, 1908, 107 years ago today . . . the day the Dutch ophthalmologist Herman Snellen died at the age of 73.

Eye doctor Herman Snellen (Dutch, 1834–1908) developed the most commonly used eye chart in the 1860s. The now iconic Snellen chart contains 11 rows of capital letters decreasing in size as the eye ...

In his famous eye chart, each row represents a different dioptre, which measures the distance you would have to be from the text to read it. Monoyer also inserted his name into the chart.