
Lock up children during eclipse – expert (1976) - apsec112
http://nicmosis.as.arizona.edu:8000/ECLIPSE_WEB/ECLIPSE_76/NP15.jpg
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wmil
My elementary school actually did this during the 1994 annular eclipse. They
literally taped all the windows shut.

They wouldn't even set up a pinhole viewer.

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aaron695
Country/State?

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wmil
North Bay, Ontario, Canada

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zaroth
I can only imagine the risks are terribly overstated.

1000 years ago we didn't have mass media hysterically screaming, "Don't look!"
and the average pleb certainly _did_ look at such an incredible sight... so
where are the reports of mass blindness following the partial eclipses of old?

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flukus
No reports of blindness, but they may have received significant eye damage.
Until the last 100-200 years when literacy become common the average pleb
wasn't really aware of their eysight deterioration.

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wahern
All kinds of human activity suffer significantly from poorer vision. For
example, sewing and weaving, hunting and fishing. The term presbyopia isn't
just derived from Greek, it was coined by the ancient Greeks themselves who
also endeavored to understand the phenomenon. See
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23773258](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23773258)

If someone's eyes were damaged I have little doubt that they'd recognize the
damage. I can imagine all sorts of reasons why this may not have been
recorded, presuming such damage was common. But that they didn't realize their
vision deteriorated, I highly doubt.

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jgalt212
Unless you are in totality or near totality, I doubt a child would notice
anything special is going on. Unless, of course, they notice a bunch of other
people staring at the sun through glasses--and then attempt to do the same
thing sans glasses.

I was just in an area of 70% coverage and away from all the starers, I did not
notice anything special going on. It was a bit dimmer at mid-day, but that
could have been easily ascribed to cloud coverage.

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adrianmonk
There may be something to this. I was an elementary school kid during the late
70s (1979?) eclipse. We went out onto the playground to view it, and I'm
pretty sure I ignored all the warnings to not look directly at the sun. (It's
not like I hadn't looked directly at the sun before, though.)

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hedora
This article has an impressively poor explanation of how pinhole viewers work.

