Glorious glass – worth more than gold?

https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/glorious-glass-worth-more-gold

by drdee • 3 years ago

35 14 3 years ago

britishmuseum.org

Chris2048• 3 years ago

That "Imported Roman blown-glass rhyton with a deer’s head" sure looks a lot more like a snail..

KaiserPro2• 3 years ago

That was my thought too..

hinkley2• 3 years ago

I find myself from time to time wondering how we discovered vitreous materials in the first place. Roaring fire on a mud flat perhaps? Kids putting random shit in campfires?

woleium• 3 years ago

cooking fires on the beach i'd imagine.

KaiserPro2• 3 years ago

Perhaps its from metallurgy? or maybe cooking fires that got out of hand in a home made stove?

ProjectArcturis• 3 years ago

Very large bonfires might reach about 2000F. Sand melts to glass at 3000F.

Obsidian is volcanic glass. We might have also seen glass near meteorite impacts, or perhaps lightning strikes. If not from those natural phenomena, we might have discovered it as a side product of smelting copper, or perhaps some shop's apprentice messing around with the furnace.

isaacg• 3 years ago

In particular, copper smithing predates glassmaking, 10000 years ago versus 4000 years ago

jiggawatts• 3 years ago

Dirt in certain places has the right mix of minerals to melt at much lower temperatures than sand alone, and would have made melted lumps under large campfires. The source material might have been natural, or the side-effect of some other industry, such as slag from smelting.

You can imagine the sequence of steps: Kids playing with sticks pulling out the red-hot gooey mess. Trying to make the gooey things solidify into interesting shapes. Realising the results are durable and shiny, if a bit ugly in colour. Then experimenting with mixing different kinds of dirt and clay to change the colours. Eventually discovering that translucent is possible, then transparent, etc...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_glass

eye-robot• 3 years ago

Sorry, but cooktops are definitely NOT glass....

exceptotron• 3 years ago

Induction cooktops are.

taskforcegemini• 3 years ago

a lot of them are, like ceran cooktops

ethagknight• 3 years ago

Note to self, if you have some game changing technology and only you know about it, pretend you have a nemesis who stole your secret and is in the process of notifying the Assyrians or the Soviets or the Martians or whatever

Glorious glass – worth more than gold?

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