Arthur Forknall started with an
engineering apprenticeship and took one of the early pre-war optometry courses,
probably in
Manchester.He set up practice in
Parliament Street, Nottingham, where in the late1940s he soon developed an interest in contact lenses.He was often visited by his friends, Robert Fletcher and Arthur Stokes of
Newbolds in Longton and they jointly experimented with impression lenses and
PMMA lens manufacture.Forknall
preferred the Norman Bier method of preformed fitting with fenestration to
improve tolerance.
He started a small laboratory in the late 1940s with one or
two technicians using a system of partial moulding even for pre-formed lenses.He made lenses very fine and very thin.He adopted the offset or zonal lenses which had been designed by Arthur
Bennett from an idea suggested by McKellen following his visit to the
US
in1947.Torics were also produced
along with 'Fen Corn' lenses for assessing the optic fit of preformed
lenses.These were similar to the
FLOM lenses designed by Bier.He
co-operated extensively with McKellen on sclerals but also produced very thin,
high quality corneal lenses.In 1954
the Contact lens Society awarded him a grant to evaluate the potential of the
corneal lenses then available.Following
his death his flourishing practice, which was 80% contact lenses, was taken over
by Geoffrey Woodward in 1962.The
laboratory was taken over by Shiels and the offset lens design by Robert Turner
of GT Optics.
'Measuring corneal clearances by Slit-lamp', The
Optician, 140, 3640, 6 Jan. 1961
