The Glass Age 1300-present

_Elsa_

‘The end of the Iron Age is generally considered to coincide with the Roman Conquests, and history books tell us that it was succeeded by Antiquity and then the Middle Ages. It wasn’t until the 1300s that another material, glass, could lay claim to a material age.

Glass in its natural form has been with us since lightning first struck sand to produce fulgurites of fused quartz, which is to say long before humans started experimenting with what is now defined as an amorphous solid. Glass can be traced back to 3500 BC when the Egyptians and Mesopotamians started to produce jewellery in the form of beads. And although we’ve made glass for ornamentation ever since, by far its most important feature in everyday use is that it can be produced to be transparent to light.

According to the Glass Alliance Europe, “no other man-made material provides so many possibilities across so many industries and disciplines”. In terms of everyday applications, the generic term ‘glass’ tends to refer to familiar uses such as liquid containers, construction materials and consumer optoelectronics, or more simply bottles, windows and lenses. There are of course thousands of other ways in which glass is deployed, from scientific and medical equipment to fibre-optics, from renewable energy to automotive, while in the world of materials science lively debate continues on what substances actually constitute glass.

Although there are a multitude of different types of glass, they are all produced from the same fundamental process: that of melting silicon dioxide (sand) at high temperature and mixing it with various additives (such as sodium carbonate or ‘soda’), to create different characteristics such as strength, chemical durability and colour, before cooling it to form a new material. Although industrial production of glass can be traced back to the 13th century, it really came into its own in the mid-19th century when the ‘float’ process allowed mass production. The 20th century was to see significant innovations brought to glass production by Sir Alastair Pilkington.

One of the most important properties of glass is that it can, according to the Glass Packaging Institute: “be recycled endlessly without any loss in purity or quality,” with manufacturing from ‘cullets’ (recovered glass) requiring less energy than to make it from raw materials.’ (Source)

“In the mid-19th century various types of glass were invented,” says Rip. “Here is a picture of some of them but we’ve had enough for today so I am not going to go into that. See you all next week.”

Let’s continue - The Steel Age 1800s-present

Start at the beginning – Tiffi goes back to school to learn about the prehistoric ages