\n\n"}\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nI just saw a video title on YouTube that said something like \u201cWhy is glass transparent?\u201d And that\u2019s an interesting question and I\u2019m sure it\u2019s great that the video exists but my first thought was like \u201cBecause glass is terrible, obviously.\u201d Because it\u2019s unwieldy and let\u2019s out warmth and needs to be heated to hundreds of degrees to be shaped and turns into hundreds of tiny daggers if you drop it. Why the hell would we bother with that if it didn\u2019t have some magical quality like being totally transparent despite being solid? Glass is transparent because if it weren\u2019t, we\u2019d use something else.
looking through my \u201cme\u201d tag and this is apparently what I was thinking 3 years ago
\nIf you\u2019re still curious we did not start working glass for its transparency.\u00a0 It was most likely started as a sanitary concern.\u00a0 Glass is easy to clean with soap and water, once it\u2019s cleaned out you can use it again for anything and no germs or flavor from the previous meal or drink will remain.
\nOther materials at the time, namely clay, would absorb flavors and germs meaning that if you ate beef off a clay plate your next meal with that plate could have beef flavor and microbes common on cow meat on it.\u00a0 That would leak out seemingly at random no less.\u00a0 Heck imagine a sick person coughing into their soup bowl and then months later their germs hiding in the clay would pop out to infect whole new people.
\nAlso the earliest human use of glass we know of is for its sharpness.\u00a0 Pre-historic people would use volcanic glass as sharp knives for food preparation.\u00a0 Also beads.\u00a0 Pretty much any new substance humans get their hands on for most of our history we immediately try to make into beads.
\nThe fact that it could become see through was a side benefit.
\nthis is amazing and I\u2019m really glad I reblogged that old bullshit post because I got to learn this
\nAll very interesting.
\nPlus: \nPretty much any new substance humans get their hands on for most of our history we immediately try to make into beads\u00a0
\nIncluding Trinitite, which is what the ground turns into under an atomic blast.\u00a0 Yep.\u00a0 People saw bits of radioactive bombed-out melted desert and thought \u201clet\u2019s make jewelry out of this!\u201d
\nHowever, it\u2019s worth noting that the transparency was initially pursued just because it made wine look nicer
\n\n\n\nRoman glass production developed from Hellenistic\n technical traditions, initially concentrating on the production of \nintensely coloured cast glass vessels. However, during the 1st century \nAD the industry underwent rapid technical growth that saw the \nintroduction of glass blowing and the dominance of colourless or \u2018aqua\u2019 \nglasses.
\n(\u2026)
\n\nAs a result of these factors, the cost of production was reduced and \nglass became available for a wider section of society in a growing \nvariety of forms. By the mid-1st century AD this meant that glass \nvessels had moved from a valuable, high-status commodity, to a material \ncommonly available: \u201ca [glass] drinking cup could be bought for a copper\n coin\u201d (Strabo, Geographica XVI.2). \n\n
\n(\u2026)
\nThe siting of glass-making workshops was governed by three primary \nfactors: the availability of fuel which was needed in large quantities, \nsources of sand which represented the major constituent of the glass, \nand natron to act as a flux. Roman glass relied on natron from Wadi El \nNatrun, and as a result it is thought that glass-making workshops during\n the Roman period may have been confined to near-coastal regions of the \neastern Mediterranean.[11]\n This facilitated the trade in the raw colourless or naturally coloured \nglass which they produced, which reached glass-working sites across the \nRoman empire.[11]
\n