In Britain 200,000 elderly people used to go slowly blind as a result of cataracts. Gradually, they were no longer able to read a newspaper, drive, admire their children or more often grandchildren, watch birds or view the passing scene. Today sight can be restored in most cases by a 30-minute operation, usually under local anaesthetic, that implants an artificial lens in place of an aged, opaque one.

Pebble-thick lenses have gone for ever and the latest artificial lenses will render even bifocals and halfmoons obsolete so that septuagenarian vision may be as good as, sometimes even better, than it was when he or she was aged 7.

This revolutionary advance in medicine is the result of the determination of the late Sir Harold Ridley, the British eye surgeon born 100 years ago. His resolution has already saved the sight of 200 million people worldwide, a figure that increases annually by nine million.

Ridley was assisted by, and always acknowledged, the support of an optician, John Pike, of Rayners the lens makers, and a chemist, Dr John Holt, of ICI, who advised Ridley on the design of the lens and possible improvements.

Dr David Apple, an American ophthalmologist, friend and follower of Sir Harold, has written a well-produced, illustrated and researched biography of him. It gives not only the details of his life but also a fair account of the professional battles he had to win before his idea of the artificial intraocular lens became accepted.

Personal antipathies and professional rivalries are not confined to politics but occur in every job. In Ridley’s case, if he had not been resolute, the artificial lens would possibly never have been introduced. As it was, there was a delay in its introduction that in his opinion resulted in a generation of people being left with near blindness or a distorted vision through pebble spectacles.

In 1555 Harold Ridley’s ancestor, Bishop Nicholas Ridley, was martyred for holding unfashionable religious opinions. In 1935 his descendant earned the ire of Sir Stewart Duke Elder, the leading ophthalmologist of his day. Duke Elder, having appointed Harold Ridley to Moorfields Eye Hospital, expected the new man to be suitably deferential. Unfortunately, the two men had minor differences of opinion about the treatment of patients. The animosity that this produced overshadowed Ridley’s work for the rest of his life.

At the start of the war, Ridley enhanced his reputation as an eye surgeon as the result of his work on the damaged eyes of air crews. After the Battle of Britain he joined the army, where Duke Elder was already responsible for posting ophthalmologists. But despite Ridley’s reputation as a surgeon, Duke Elder sent him to northwestern Ghana. Ridley believed that Duke Elder thought that without casualties to operate on, his reputation would be sunk for ever. But Ridley, who was described by a postgraduate dean of Moorfields as a man who had a mind like a rapier and the hands of a concert pianist, found another career.

Though deprived of the chance to display his surgical genius on casualties, he still had his rapier mind. Ghana at the time had appalling problems with blindness, so Ridley researched the effect of vitamin A deficiency and leprosy. He then began to tackle river blindness (ocular onchocerciasis) and, with two colleagues, developed an understanding of river blindness that revolutionised its control.

After the war, Ridley became one of the founders of the Commonwealth Society of the Blind — a later director said that his research had resulted in 34 million West Africans being protected from river blindness.

Ridley also studied the effect on the eye of its penetration by splinters of plastic Perspex from the covering of a Hurricane cockpit. He had noticed that Perspex did not set up a foreign-body reaction in the eye and was inert, whereas other substances were rejected.

Ridley argued that if it was possible to make an artificial lens of Perspex, it could replace the natural lens rendered opaque by a cataract. The first artificial intraocular lens was inserted in November 1949 and three lenses were implanted in 1950. In 1951 he presented his studies in Oxford.

The medical establishment, led by Duke Elder, ridiculed his research and treated him with open hostility, vituperative abuse and professional ostracism. Initially, only a few ophthalmologists, such as Peter Choyce and Norman Ashton in the UK and others abroad, followed Ridley’s lead. The concept of intraocular lenses gained quicker acceptance in the US, South Africa, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Russia than it did in the UK.

Twenty-five years after the first implant, the majority of the British medical establishment had accepted that implantation of an intraocular lens was the basis of cataract surgery. Now the opaque lens is pulverised, removed through a tiny insertion so small that no stitch is needed and a folded artificial lens is posted through the insertion like an envelope through a letter box, or injected. Once in position, the artificial lens unfolds.

Ridley was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, but though honoured and revered around the world, he received no British civil award until he was aged over 90. His former colleagues, pupils and admirers, who included Hillary Clinton and Cherie Blair, campaigned for some token of national recognition for a man whom history will accept as one of the greatest figures in international as well as British medicine during the 19th and 20th centuries. He was finally knighted when he was 93 and already rather deaf.

Sir Harold Ridley and his fight for Sight, by David Apple (Slack Inc., £31.95)