[time-nuts] Lifetime of glass containers

J. Forster jfor at quik.com
Tue Jun 16 17:40:51 UTC 2009


> A better
> explanation<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass#Glass_versus_a_supercooled_liquid>can
> be found in the wiki
>
> On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 4:34 PM, Chuck Harris <cfharris at erols.com> wrote:
>
>> J. Forster wrote:
>>
>>> Interestingly, I recently had dinner with an archeology professor,
>>> interested in the Etruscan period. She had just discovered a flatish
>>> piece
>>> of glass i9n a dig, thousands of years old, and believes it was made
>>> essentially like rolling out dough on a slab while red hot.
>>>
>>
>> To me, it would seem that playing with a blob of molten glass in
>> a fire, and spreading it out, or rolling it would be a more natural
>> step in the progression of making glass windows than blowing
>> a bubble.
>>
>> I would strongly expect that the earliest windows would have been
>> made by rolling the molten glass flat like it was dough.
>>
>> Much later would have come the blowing of a cylinder, and flattening
>> it out.

===========

Agreed. Also remember that in the early days, glass was more likely used
to pass light rather than be of image quality. The ability to have light
enter a room without an opening in the wall must have been near magical.

-John

=============
>>
>> In any case, there is zero evidence that glass flows at room
>> temperature.  If it did, and 180 years was all it took for a window
>> pane to become all wavy, and thicken at the bottom, all of those
>> 10,000 year old glass artifacts would be shaped like the chewing
>> gum blobs on a city sidewalk.
>>
>> -Chuck Harris





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