NEW YORK — The decade’s end was supposed to finish off those wacky, year-shaped glasses favored by the reveling seas on New Year’s Eve in Times Square and around the world.
Gone would be the convenient loops of the 1990s and the double-zero good times of the ’00s.
Where was the 1 going to go? Doubters said it couldn’t be done.
Well, turns out the 2010-shaped specs ain’t half bad.
Accommodating the 1 while making sure people can see out of the things has resulted in some semblance of symmetry, as goofy glasses go.
The tradition of wearing the year on your face can be traced to Richard Sclafani Sr. and Peter Cicero, a couple of Seattle musicians who took out a patent for a glow-in-the-dark version of the glasses after coming up with the idea over beers one night in January 1990.
They called their creations Glow-Year Glasses and got them out in time for New Year’s 1991.
The well-lubricated throng in Times Square loved them, with the tops of the 9s used for seeing. The partners also marketed the glasses to schools for happy graduates.
Everyone from David Letterman to Dick Clark and The New York Times took note, though few people knew Sclafani and Cicero by name.
The new millennium offered the grace of plentiful zeros and a whole new reason to party large, but the ‘00s also brought competition.
“The first 10 years we made them we were pretty much the only ones and it was profitable,” Sclafani said. “We sold about half a million in 2000, then after that there were just so many knockoffs.”
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