Through the glass

We associate glass with cups, bottles or windows, yet in today’s world, everything from the most important to the smallest passes through the use of this material or its most refined relative, crystal. What would we do without light bulbs, glasses, thermometers, cars, and airplanes glass or simple Pyrex oven containers? How would we observe cells and viruses without microscope lenses or distant stars without those of the telescope? Not to mention space travel, clock faces, diving masks, video cameras, computer screens, and our today’s inseparable cell phone.

The story of how glass originated and who discovered it is not at all “transparent”. Many of the old stories would be considered today as fake news.  Some scholars place the discovery in the Bronze Age (3,000 BC) in Mesopotamia, right where the Bible places the paradise of Eve and Adam. In that place – part of present-day Iraq – the big bang of civilization seems to have occurred: agriculture, cities, writing, laws, religions, commerce, accounting, bureaucracy…

Archaeologists from the early 19th century found opaque and colored glass used as decoration. It is logical to think that life in community stimulated the desire to improve the day to day and, why not, to embellish it with new materials. Some 1700 years later, at the beginning of the Iron Age, the Egyptians had learned to mold it and made amulets, eyes for their gods’ statues, mosaics and clay vessels covered with a thin layer of glass. Also, small bottles for ointments and for kohl, the eye makeup with microbicides and sun protection properties used by both men and women in ancient Egypt.

The Romans, in their extensive territory during the imperial period, spread its use in architecture when they learned to mold glass sheets to give clarity to their constructions and to protect the windows from low temperatures in winter, especially in the cold regions of the north of the Empire.  Previously, they cut thin sheets of opaque stone, such as alabaster or mica, which let in light but were not transparent. Among the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, covered by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D., numerous remains of glass sheets were found coming from the windows of the public baths.

By perfecting the technique – created in Syria in the 2nd century B.C. – of blowing the incandescent material through a tube, it became easier to handle.  From then on, the use of cups and jugs spread first among noble people and later among the rest of the people. The progress of manufacturing methods will be seen later in Venice and its master glaziers.

And now, having a glass of wine, let us imagine without much sense that today and thanks to glass, we can have the past captive through the camera, see our present in a mirror or try to “read the future” in a crystal ball.