History of glass
[1] Other archaeological evidence suggests that the first true glass was made in coastal north Syria, Mesopotamia or Egypt.
[2] The earliest known glass objects, of the mid 2,000 BCE, were beads, perhaps initially created as the accidental by-products of metal-working (slags) or during the production of faience, a pre-glass vitreous material made by a process similar to glazing.
[n 1] Glass products remained a luxury until the disasters that overtook the late Bronze Age civilizations seemingly brought glass-making to a halt.
But in general, archaeological evidence suggests that the first true glass was made in coastal north Syria, Mesopotamia or ancient Egypt.
[2] A lump of glass was found at Eridu in Iraq that can be dated to the twenty-first century BC or even earlier; it was produced during the Akkadian Empire or the early Ur III period.
The earliest known glass objects, of the mid-third millennium BCE, were beads, perhaps initially created as accidental by-products of metal-working (slags) or during the production of faience, a pre-glass vitreous material made by a process similar to glazing.
[n 1] During the Late Bronze Age in Egypt (e.g., the Ahhotep "Treasure")[6] and Western Asia (e.g., Megiddo),[7] there was a rapid growth in glassmaking technology.
The latest vessels were 'core-formed', produced by winding a ductile rope of glass around a shaped core of sand and clay over a metal rod, then fusing it by reheating it several times.
[citation needed] Threads of thin glass of different colors made with admixtures of oxides were subsequently wound around these to create patterns, which could be drawn into festoons by using metal raking tools.
The rod was subsequently allowed to cool as the glass slowly annealed and was eventually removed from the center of the vessel, after which the core material was scraped out.
[9][10][11][n 2][n 3] It is thought that the techniques and recipes required for the initial fusing of glass from raw materials were a closely guarded technological secret reserved for the large palace industries of powerful states.
[citation needed] Glass remained a luxury material, and the disasters that overtook Late Bronze Age civilizations seemed to have brought glass-making to a halt.
[citation needed][15] It picked up again in its former sites, Syria and Cyprus, in the 9th century BCE, when the techniques for making colorless glass were discovered.
Georgius Agricola, in De re metallica, reported a traditional serendipitous "discovery" tale of familiar type: "The tradition is that a merchant ship laden with nitrum being moored at this place, the merchants were preparing their meal on the beach, and not having stones to prop up their pots, they used lumps of nitrum from the ship, which fused and mixed with the sands of the shore, and there flowed streams of a new translucent liquid, and thus was the origin of glass.
The first evidence of the invention of glassblowing was found in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem, in a layer of fill inside a ritual bath that was overlain with the paving stones of the Herodian street.
Cast glass windows, albeit with poor optical qualities, began to appear in the most important buildings in Rome and the most luxurious villas of Herculaneum and Pompeii.
[citation needed] The first Persian glass comes in the form of beads dating to the late Bronze Age (1600 BCE), and was discovered during the explorations of Dinkhah Tepe in Iranian by Charles Burney.
Mosaic glass cups have also been found at Teppe Hasanlu and Marlik Tepe in northern Iran, dating to the Iron Age.
[3] Texts such as the Shatapatha Brahmana and Vinaya Pitaka mention glass, implying they could have been known in India during the early first millennium BCE.
[26] However, the first unmistakable evidence for widespread glass usage comes from the ruins of Taxila (3rd century BCE), where bangles, beads, small vessels, and tiles were discovered in large quantities.
[29] The earliest glass items in China come from the Warring States period (475–221 BCE), although they are rare in number and limited in archaeological distribution.
[30] Imported glass objects first reached China during the late Spring and Autumn period (early 5th century BCE), in the form of polychrome eye beads.
However, during the 1st century CE, the industry underwent rapid technical growth that saw the introduction of glass-blowing and the dominance of colorless or ‘aqua’ glasses.
[citation needed] Evidence suggests that indigenous glass production existed in West Africa well before extensive contact with other glassmaking regions.
[43] Archaeological excavations at Igbo Olokun, a site in northern Ife, have yielded a substantial quantity of glass beads, crucibles, and production debris dating from the 11th to 15th centuries CE.
Seeking to find an alternative to Venetian cristallo, he used flint as a silica source, but his glasses tended to crizzle, developing a network of small cracks destroying its transparency.
[56] By 1696, after the patent expired, twenty-seven glasshouses in England were producing flint glass and were exporting all over Europe with such success that, in 1746, the British Government imposed a lucrative tax on it.
De Nehou's process of rolling molten glass poured on an iron table rendered the manufacture of very large plates possible.
The sheet, still soft, is pushed into the open mouth of an annealing tunnel or temperature-controlled oven called a lehr, down which it was carried by a system of rollers.
This semi-automatic process used machines that were capable of producing 200 standardized bottles per hour, many times quicker than the traditional methods of manufacture.
