Why do Accountants wear Visors?

Why do Accountants wear Visors?

During the late 1800’s up to the mid 1900’s, accountants were wearing green visors or ‘green eyeshades, in order to protect their eyes from strain and other effects caused by working under direct light which was used to illuminate their work desks. During that time, many companies use bright and glaring lights which impose a lot of difficulties especially for workers who really need to focus on small details such as computations, figures and text. For accountants, working with long spreadsheets containing millions of numbers and keeping them in balance is very hard and tedious. Working in an environment with glaring lights can even make it harder.

So what they did is they wore these green visors which are often but not always made up of celluloid, a transparent dark green or blue green plastic material. This shields the wearer’s eyes from exposure to direct incandescent light and prevents eyestrain as it lessens the glare from the overhead incandescent lights. This is very beneficial for those who are working in a detailed-oriented type of job like accounting, copywriting, editorial, etc. Those who are working in this field needs to protect their eyes because losing it can greatly affect their job.

In the present, accountants no longer wear these visors because of the presence of overhead fluorescent lighting and computers. Although there are still some accountants who work on paper, wearing visors is no longer the trend. But we can’t still forget that during early times, these visors were of great help to them.