Ancient Glass
A Roman period glass bowl
from York, England
Around 75 BC, there was a huge change in the way people made glass. The Phoenicians figured out how to make glass cheaply and easily. They learned to blow glass. You stick a gob of hot glass onto the end of a long metal pipe, and you blow through the pipe as if you were blowing up a balloon. The air makes the gob of glass blow up, just like a balloon. Then as you blow you can shape the glass with a metal stick. This isn't easy,but it is a lot easier than the glass-string method!
Blowing glass at the Corning Museum in New York State
A Roman man blowing glass
Soon after this, the Phoenicians also figured out how to just blow the glass right into a mold (this is called mold-blown glass). Then you don't even have to shape it yourself, and you can get all sorts of fancy shapes. Glass became cheap enough to replace pottery cups for most people, and was very widely used all over the Roman Empire. There were big centers of glass production not only in Phoenicia but also in modern Köln (northern Germany) and other places around the Roman Empire. Roman traders shipped glass through West Asia and India as far as China.
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Glass production in Europe collapsed with the end of the Roman Empire in the 400s AD. But the Islamic Empire and the Roman Empire in the east continued to use a lot of glass, and glass gradually came back to Europe during the Middle Ages. During the Middle Ages, Venice was a big center of glass manufacturing.
To find out more about ancient and medieval glass, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
How Glass Is Made, by Alan J. Paterson (1985). For kids, but it's really about modern glass technology.
Studies in Ancient Technology: Leather in Antiquity - Sugar and Its Substitutes in Antiquity - Glass, by R. J. Forbes (2nd revised edition 1997). Only part of the book is about glass, but it will tell you everything you need to know about glass in ancient Greece and Rome. By a specialist, for adults.
Early Glass of the Ancient World: 1600 B.C.-A. D. 50, by E. M. Stern (1995). Marianne Stern is the leading world expert on ancient glass.
Roman, Byzantine and Early Medieval Glass: Ernesto Wolf Collection, by E. M. Stern and others (2002). Same expert author as above.
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