I was in line at the post office just now, and it was long, and I was doing some thinking. Relatedly, I have a Topo Chico bottle in my cupholder that keeps rattling around. It is made of glass.
How in the world did we discover glass? Were we just throwing things into fires and seeing what came out? And then we did it with sand and out popped a fish tank?
I couldn’t find a straight, definite answer online, but the majority of speculators speculated one of the two following paths.
Path Number One:
- Humans realize the wet ground hardens when the sun shines on it. Humans try making the wet ground harden really fast. Humans use fire to do this. With a certain type of mud—clay—this results in the invention of pottery.
- When firing pottery, humans notice the sand in the clay is melting and forming glass. Depending where they are on earth, they may or may not already know glass from previous use of naturally occurring volcanic glass. Either way, they start throwing sand into the fire, and if the fire’s hot enough, glass comes out.
Path Number Two:
- Humans find something shiny in the river and realize it is also hard and malleable. They begin to use it to make tools and bling. Today, we call this metal.
- Humans see lines of metal in rocks and try a bunch of things to get it out. One of these is heating the rocks up (two possible tie-ins to the clay route here—they might already know fire works with clay, or melted metal might just drip out when they have some rocks mixed in with their clay). It works! They do this more and more, and eventually there’s sand in there—sand which makes glass.
I find this interesting. And not only when I’m in line at the post office. I’ve been out of line for forty minutes. Glass is still on the mind. Specifically, I’m wondering about the fish tanks.
