History of glass and crystal; Part 1.

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What is the origin of the glass?
The incredible story of glass and crystal will make you travel in time and space.
Two millennia of history, two centuries of climax.
This material, creation of the man, is today a symbol of elegance and know-how.
Glass table, lighting, decorative objects, but also jewelry, you will discover the evolution of manufacturing techniques and the different uses of the time.
The history of glass, says Pliny the Elder, begins many centuries before our era, by a strong storm in the Mediterranean.
That day, the sea is so disassembled that a boat of Phoenician merchants must come to shelter on the coast.
We pull the ship to the shore and then prepare to bivouac.
Las! Impossible to heat this pot because the fire is lit badly as the wind is bad.
On the sandy beach, the crew searched in vain for some stones that would protect the home and allow to stall the pot.
But hunger makes the man clever, a sailor will seek, in the cargo of the ship, a few blocks of sodium carbonate to surround the fire.
When the meal is over, we see, on the site of the hearth, a marvelous substance hard, translucent and brilliant, miraculously created by the reaction of the nitre on the sand.
Thus was born the glass according to the legend.
The modern historian, the Pliny of the twentieth century, is far too concerned with objectivity to be content with it. Based on the discoveries of the archaeologist and the analyzes of the chemist, he seeks the truth by other means.
The discovery of glass is the natural, necessary consequence of the manufacture of iron or bronze, one of the first inventions of the sociable man.
In the metallurgy of iron and bronze, the gangues of ores produce slags
(Mixtures of alkaline or earthy silicates) which, unclean, opaque and colored, are none the less glasses.
Be that as it may, twenty centuries before our era, the Egyptians knew how to produce pastas of multicolored glasses of which they make pieces of jewelery, pearls, often assembled in necklaces, witness this pearl discovered in the tomb of Amenhotep (1551- 1527 BC).
Refined and enamored like all Oriental perfumes and make-ups, they also make tiny vials for the transport of these precious products that they export throughout the ancient world.
For fifteen centuries, the glass, barely translucent, remains a luxurious matter, limited in its forms and its uses to the narrow possibilities of the techniques employed: the size, like the quartz or the precious stones, and especially the molding around a nucleus sand.
First revolution, the discovery of the blowing:
In the first century of the Christian era, the first major glass revolution occurred: the invention of blowing, which gives glass its marvelous transparency and plasticity.
The cane to blow (see the language of the glassmaker), like a magic wand, will transform the destinies of the glass industry by allowing him to create, in large series, the usual containers.
Through this revolution, glass enters our daily life.
From that time, the history of glass reflects the epic of our twenty centuries, in the course of struggles between East and West.