History of Glass

The Romance of Glass

The mysterious physical, optical and aesthetic properties of glass have ever intrigued man. Even the most sophisticated 20th century
man is amazed and bemused by this solid, which he has been told is really a rigid uncrystallized liquid. The product and the process used to manufacture it seem to smack of alchemy, for glass is nothing but coarse sand and soda ash transformed into smooth transparent forms.

According to the Roman historian Pliny, who wrote in Naturalis Historica in 77 A.D., man first produced glass by accident about the year 5000 B.C. Phoenician sailors, feasting on a beach near Belus in Asia Minor, could find no stones on which to place their cooking pots; therefore, they set them on blocks of soda carried by their ship as cargo. As the fire's heat increased, the sand and soda turned to molten glass.

Pliny's anecdote is now considered apocryphal, but it contains an accurate recipe for producing glass: heat plus silica and soda ash.