ABSTRACT

Glass is one of the oldest substances known, and a material similar to glass of volcanic origin was used for arrowheads during the Bronze Age. In the first century A.D., Pliny wrote of sailors who used blocks of soda from their cargo to make a fireplace on the beach and discovered that the soda fused with the sand to form glass. It is believed that the Egyptians were using glass as early as 3000 B.C. The blowpipe is known to have been used in Sidon during the first century B.C. for making hollow glass articles, and by the third centmy of the Christian era, articles of glass were in fairly common use in Roman households. The commercial success of the Venetian glassblowers in the sixteenth century is well known, and the term flint glass refers to the very pure silica in the form of flint used by these artisans of Venice.