Rayner (company)

Rayner based in Brighton & Hove East Sussex is a British manufacturer of intraocular lenses and associated surgical instruments. With Sir Harold Ridley, they were pioneers in the field from 1949 when Ridley successfully implanted the first intraocular lens (IOL) at St Thomas' Hospital, London.

The story of the Rayner Company begins in 1910, when Mr John Baptiste Reiner and Mr Charles Davis Keeler opened their first optician’s shop at No 9, Vere Street, London, England. They registered their company as Reiner & Keeler Ltd on 30 October 1910. Before forming the company, J.B. Reiner had completed an apprenticeship in 'the art of an optician and scientific instrument maker' in 1891 and had gone on to work for E.B. Merrowitz Ltd, a branch of a well-known American optical company.

In 1915, during the First World War, the company name was changed to Rayner & Keeler Ltd. This was almost certainly a commercial decision of the time as J. B. Reiner retained his name all his life.

The two founding directors separated in 1917 when C. D. Keeler resigned and severed all his interests with the Company.

In 1948, Mr Harold Ridley, consultant ophthalmologist at St Thomas' Hospital and Moorfields Eye Hospital, London, together with John Pike of Rayner met privately to discuss a new project. Pike, a director of Rayner and their senior optical specialist, had assisted Ridley with several projects, most recently on the development of electronic ophthalmoscopy. Ridley called his new project the artificial lenticulus project and asked Pike for Rayner’s help in the design and manufacture of an implantable lens.

In David Apple’s article from the January 1996 issue of Survey of Ophthalmology, Ridley recalls ‘...After months of secret thought, I called my friend John Pike, the optical scientist at Rayners of London with whom I had recently worked on electronic ophthalmoscopy. I suggested that we meet in my car after completing our routine duties that day. So it came about that two men sitting in a car in Cavendish Square one evening devised all the principles of a new operation.’

Perspex was chosen as the preferred material because of its lightness in weight and good optical properties. Also observations during the war of eye injuries to RAF personnel had shown that Perspex appeared inert within body tissues. Perspex was registered in 1934 by ICI as the trademark for their polymethylmethacrylate acrylic sheet. In the late 1930s, as a result of Britain’s rearmament programme, ICI’s total production of Perspex was reserved for the aircraft industry and the material was specifically developed for the use of fighter aircraft. The required properties of transparency, strength and resistance to heat demanded a high degree of purity and polymerisation. The post war commercial development of Perspex had resulted in a quite different material from that of the war years but, to ICI’s credit, led by Dr John Holt they again produced the high quality fighter aircraft Perspex which they called Transpex I.

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