Before people learned to make glass, they had found two forms of natural glass. When lightning strikes sand, the heat sometimes fuses the sand into long, slender glass tubes called fulgurites, which are commonly called petrified lightning. The terrific heat of a volcanic eruption also sometimes fuses rocks and sand into a glass called obsidian. In the early times, people would shape obsidian into knives, arrowheads, jewelry, and money. We do not know exactly when, where, or how people first learned to make glass. It is generally believed that the first manufactured glass was in the form of a glaze on ceramic vessels, about 3000 B.C. The first glass vessels were produced about 1500 B.C. in Egypt and Mesopotamia. The glass industry was extremely successful for the next 300 years, and then declined. It was revived in Mesopotamia in the 700′s B.C. and in Egypt in the 500′s B.C. For the next 500 years, Egypt, Syria, and the other countries along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea were glassmaking centers.
Early glassmaking was slow and costly, and it required hard work. Glass blowing and glass pressing were unknown, furnaces were small, the clay pots were of poor quality, and the heat was hardly sufficient for melting. But glassmakers eventually learned how to make colored glass jewelry, cosmetics cases, and tiny jugs and jars. People who could afford them—the priests and the ruling classes—considered glass objects as valuable as jewels. Soon merchants learned that wines, honey, and oils could be carried and preserved far better in glass than in wood or clay containers.
The blowpipe was invented about 30 B.C., probably along the eastern Mediterranean coast. This invention made glass production easier, faster, and cheaper. As a result, glass became available to the common people for the first time. Glass manufacture became important in all countries under Roman rule. In fact, the first four centuries of the Christian Era may justly be called the First Golden Age of Glass. The glassmakers of this time knew how to make a transparent glass, and they did offhand glass blowing, painting, and gilding (application of gold leaf). They knew how to build up layers of glass of different colors and then cut out designs in high relief. The celebrated Portland vase, which was probably made in Rome about the beginning of the Christian Era, is an excellent example of this art. This vase is considered one of the most valuable glass art objects in the world.
In the 1500′s, the Dutch developed ways to make custom eyeglasses as well as lenses which led to the first microscopes and telescopes.
The first glass factory in the United States was built in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1608. The venture failed within a year because of a famine that took the lives of many colonists. The Jamestown colonists tried glassmaking again in 1621, but an Indian attack in 1622 and the scarcity of workers ended this attempt in 1624. The industry was reestablished in America in 1739, when Caspar Wistar built a glassmaking plant in what is now Salem County, New Jersey. This plant operated until 1780.
In 1903, the first fully automated glass bottle making machine was used in Toledo, Ohio.
Glass has been a major part in many revolutionary inventions. Had it not been for glass, we could be living in a World with no thermometers, televisions or light bulbs.
Cool Info About Glass
A process called “vitrification” can turn Nuclear waste into Hard glass blocks for long-term storage.
Glass takes 1,000,000 years to decompose.
Glass never wears out-it can be recycled forever.
Glass recycling saves resources-each ton of recycled glass replaces 1.2 tons of raw material (sand, limestone and soda ash).
Glass: a transparent inorganic material produced by combining silica sand with burnt lime or limestone and soda ash.
Silica sand: a pure form of silicon dioxide that is the most common ingredient in glass manufacturing.
Soda ash: also known as sodium oxide, this is an ingredient in glass manufacturing. It helps sand melt at a lower temperature.
Glasphalt: similar to asphalt, but it contains ground glass instead of gravel.
Limestone: a type of rock that is blended with soda ash in glass manufacturing to stabilize the glass so it will not dissolve in water.
When the Model T Ford car was first introduced, the glass windscreen was an optional extra.
Bulletproof glass is made of several layers called laminating. In between the glass is a polycarbonate material that absorbs the energy of what has been fired at it. The thicker the glass, the higher impact it can withstand. There is even one-way bulletproof glass enabling the target victim to shoot back.
If glass had not been invented, windows would not have come about so what would your PC operating system be called?
What is Glass?
Glass is not a crystalline solid, but a random jumble of molecules. Because of its random structure it does not have a clear melting temperature and there is no temperature where it can be said to be definitely solid. Instead, it gradually becomes harder as it cools.
Historians have pointed out that the glass in some centuries-old windows is thicker at the bottom, as if the glass had slumped over the years.
Scientists still debate whether room-temperature glass is a solid or some other state of matter. But according to one study, to see the flow of cool glass we would have to wait ten billion times the age of the universe. So those ancient windows are thicker at the bottom because they were made that way, not because of any later flowing of the glass.
