I have been involved in intraocular lens (IOL) implantation since 1952, stimulated by the work of Harold Ridley, and I am still active as an IOL surgeon in an out-patient location. I thank the Organizing Committee of this 5th Congress of the EIIC for their request to give a kind of warming-up, with a talk about the evolution of IOL surgery. In honour of Harold Ridley, who is present here, I want to show a short film demonstrating how I did a Ridley operation in 1955. In the meantime, let us start with the eye that receives an IOL, the recipient eye. It is interesting to know that, in the beginning, IOLs were used in sick or otherwise inferior eyes. This was not always fair for the IOL. Then there was the choice between intracapsular and extracapsular cataract extraction (ICCE and ECCE). Long before the first IOL, some 60 years ago, ICCE had become the routine of choice and had developed into a nearly perfect operation. Imagine what it was for Ridley and his followers to do an ECCE! It i~ not even a secret that Ridley tried out his IOLs in a small series of intracapsular cases. After a relatively successful series of 15 Ridley lenses, I decided that the Ridley operation was not an operation for general use. The Ridley IOL finally was abandoned. With the exception of some AC anglesupported lenses, there was a world-wide calm in the implantation field and even a hostile attitude developed. Epstein and myself worked, still in the 1950s, and independently, on a method of iris fixation that could be used following ICCE. After 1958, I implanted an increasing number of iris clip lenses for many years when hardly anybody still believed in IOLs. The iris clip lens made a breakthrough for the IOL! In 1963, however, I started to experiment with ECCE again and with an adapted IOL design, the iridocapsular IOL, I could prove that ECCE was the better method to stabilize an IOL, and also that ECCE was a better method for the eye itself. Today, most IOL surgeons will tell you that ECCE is to be preferred, this despite