Glass Blowing

Heat applied to a mixture of sand, soda, and lime is all that is required in the glass making process. Legend contends that Roman seaman preparing their evening meal on a beach inadvertently discovered the secret of glassmaking in the 1st century. Using stones of nitron, a soda used to embalm the dead, the unwitting sailors are said to have heated both the stones and sand below creating a molten liquid that was believed to be mans first experience with glassmaking.

Thorough historical research now contends that Mesopotamian potters fused sand and minerals while firing their pots nearly 2500 years earlier. Approximately one thousand years passed when an enterprising Mesopotamian craftsman introduced the art of glassblowing to mankind using a crudely fabricated glass tube to blow hallow vessel. Between the 1st and 2nd century B.C. the first metal blowpipe was introduced and glass production flourished, especially within the Roman Empire where both rich and poor had access to glass.

The fall of the Roman Empire was accompanied by a decline in the production of glass, until the rise of the Islamic world and their production of beautifully colored and delicately shaped designs. Throughout the history of glassmaking, production has been markedly effected by the rise and fall of the earth?s great civilizations. During the Italian Renaissance, Venice and Murano produced glass sought by the world?s aristocracy. The British Empire's glass tradition came to the New World with Jamestown's first colonists, half a dozen of whom were glassblowers.

In the 1820's Bakewell, Page, and Bakewell introduced the first actual development in the production of glass since the advent of glassblowing. They patented a process of mechanically pressing hot glass. The tedious process of handcrafting was no longer necessary, making glass inexpensive and easily acquired. Artisans who wished to work in the glass industry were forced to find employment with the commercial factories that made these utilitarian objects. In 1962 Harvery Littleton discovered that certain types of glass could be melted at a low enough temperature to allow the use of small home-studio furnaces. Littleton?s discovery helped deliver resurgence in the production of art glass.