Glass Making

     Not very much is known about the very first attempts at making glass. One Roman historian says that it was some Phoenician sailors. He said that they landed on a beach, propped up a cooking pot on some blocks of natron, some of the cargo they were carrying, and made a fire with which they would make a meal. But they were surprised to see that the sand below the fire had meted and it ran in a liquid stream and when it later cooled it turned into glass.

    But still no one really knows how glass first came to be made. Some think that the ability to make glass came from experiments with a mixture of silica-sand and an alkali binder, which was known as faience. Faience had been used for over a thousand years for making decorative things like beads and amulets.

    Maybe the first development was when the potters fired up their wares. We still don’t know if the first glass was colorful, hard, shiny decorations that were fused to a clay pot’s surface in the heat of the furnace. But they found out later that if the material was thick enough, it would stand by itself. Then the pieces of glass could be shaped by grinding with stones, or sand and water, to make vessels.

    There were ancient instructions found from at least 3,300 years ago that tell of ancient instructions for making glass. They were written on clay tablets in a cuneiform alphabet, and it was from Mesopotamia.

Resources:

The Corning Museum of Glass

By: Thomas Hunt