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3: Glass through the ages
Glassmaking was one of the earliest industries. It was even the very first industry in America. In 1608 the newly arrived colonists in Jamestown, Virginia, began making glass for export back to England using the sand from the seashore.
Glass was first made in the ancient world somewhere in the Middle East perhaps about
2500 b.c. It was in the form of small beads. By 1450 b.c. glass bottles were being made in Egypt. They already had the combination of sand and soda common in most modern glass. Bottles were often decorated with a zigzag pattern.
From Egypt the art of glassmaking spread around the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, arriving in Greece by the 9th century b.c. As Alexander the Great forged a new empire that stretched to India, glassmaking spread into Asia. As a result, by 200 b.c. glass beads were being made in India.
Ancient glass
Almost as soon as people began to melt metal, they began to make glass. However, although sand melted and made glass in the hearths used to melt copper metal, it was unrecognisable as a special material and thrown away as part of the unwanted waste products.
At some point, however, someone noticed that glass was an attractive material. This probably did not happen during metalworking. It might have happened when people heated their pottery in order to make it hard and workable. Here, too, are the high temperatures needed to make sand melt. Or could
it have been by accident around a wood fire set for cooking on a seashore? That might have produced just the right conditions for the sand to melt and form into beads at lower temperatures because the ash from wood fires acted as the source of the flux.
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