You Kidding? Contact Lens For Chickens?

THIS story is strictly for the birds.

It is about a Seattle man's dream to build a better mousetrap and have the world beat a path to his doorstep.

Don Van der Giessen's ``mousetrap'' was contact lenses for chickens.

Honest. I'm not pulling your drumstick.

Van der Giessen actually sold 1.25 million pairs of them in the mid-'60s before the chickens developed the same problem basketball players have: keeping the lenses from falling out.

You've seen basketball players down on the hardwood on their hands and knees looking for a teammate's contact lens. Just imagine 10,000 chickens doing the same thing. How's a hen gonna lay eggs when she spends all her time looking for her contact lenses?

Needless to say, Van der Giessen did not get finger-licking rich. Entrepreneurial-wise, he laid an egg.

He was deadly serious at the time.

``I thought for sure I was going to be a millionaire. For one time in my life, I had something that nobody else had,'' Van der Giessen said.

``You must understand that when one talks about contact lenses for chickens, one's sanity is immediately questioned.''

I met the 59-year-old Van der Giessen in a neighborhood coffee shop. He's not a nut. He's a bright, entertaining guy.

Casually, he mentioned recent news accounts of someone inventing contact lenses for chickens. He said it wasn't new - he had done it 25 years ago.

His contact-lenses-for-chickens venture was the centerpiece of a delightful family booklet he wrote, appropriately entitled ``Strictly for the Birds.''

Van der Giessen and a partner, who since has died, came up with the idea in 1965.

No, chickens didn't need better eyesight. No, they're not vain and don't want to be seen in regular glasses.

Chickens are cannibalistic. When they see red blood, they go for it. It had been a poultry problem for generations.

Van der Giessen's contact lenses were made of clear red plastic, which theoretically caused chickens to see red as black.

At the time, Van der Giessen was operating a poultry medicine, equipment and supplies firm, Capps & Lowe, on South First Avenue near Sears.

Poultry researchers had spent years trying to solve the problem of chickens pecking one another to death.

An early solution was Dr. Salsburg's No Pick - a horrible-tasting red substance painted on chickens to discourage further cannibalism. It was a dud.

Then came ``specs'' - light metal blinder-type glasses held on with a cotter key that punctured the membrane and nostrils. They allowed only vision to the left, so the chickens wouldn't peck one another.

They were effective, but the chickens had trouble finding their feed and water. Growth and egg production suffered.

The ``specs'' looked like granny glasses on the chickens' noses.

``I was just a little boy the first time I saw them,'' Van der Giessen recalled. ``There were hundreds of chickens with glasses on. I thought it was the funniest sight I ever saw.''

The ``specs'' weren't solving the problem completely, but they made the chickens look smarter.

Against that backdrop, Van der Giessen came up with his contact-lenses idea.

He visited poultry researchers at Purdue, the University of Iowa and the University of Nebraska, and talked to ophthalmologists - one of whom first thought Van der Giessen was a candidate for Crackpot of the Year.

The media go bonzo about such an offbeat thing a contact lenses for chickens.

When a product-announcement press conference was held at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, everyone was there - Time, Life, U.S. News & World Report, The Wall Street Journal. The story got 15 minutes on Walter Cronkite's news program.

``We got one-third of the front page of The San Francisco Examiner,'' Van der Giessen recalled. Millions of dollars were just around the corner.

The contact lenses would be sold for 4 cents a pair. After research and development costs, they would cost only two-tenths of a cent to manufacture. The world had billions and billions of chickens needing contact lenses.

Then it all started to fall apart.

Getting the contact lenses on the chickens wasn't that easy. Van der Giessen gulped as he watched one poultry farmer strangle a chicken trying to get its contact lenses on.

``The lenses were placed in rather young chickens,'' Van der Giessen said. ``When the chickens reached the age of 38 to 42 weeks, the eyes became satcheled, the lids became loose, and the lenses started to pop out.

``When this happened, havoc occurred . . . and our sales halted.

``I remember the sick feeling of seeing red-colored lenses lying in the manure and chickens walking all over them.''

A great idea gone to doo-doo.

Therein lies the deeper moral: Van der Giessen can look back at his dream of fame and fortune from contact lenses for chickens, and laugh at himself. We all need that.

Don Hannula's column appears Wednesday on The Times' editorial page.