Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader (78 page)

The Spanish abbreviation for UFO is OVNI—
objeto volador no identificado
.

FIRST GLASS

From where you sit, you can probably see several pieces of glass: a window, the bathroom mirror, maybe even a glass shower door. Here’s the BRI’s history of glass
.

A
NCIENT GLASS
Glass has existed for millions of years. Whenever natural events involving super-high temperatures—volcanic activity, lightning strikes, or the impact of meteorites—cause certain types of rocks to melt, fuse, and then cool rapidly, glass is formed. Fossil evidence shows that Stone Age humans used this natural glass to make tools, such as spearheads and cutting instruments, as far back as 9,000 years ago. (Better dating techniques may eventually push that date back much further.) Obsidian, the shiny, black glass formed when lava cools quickly (as when flowing into water), was widely used by ancient people for these purposes.

After thousands of years of using naturally-formed glass, humans finally discovered how to make it—probably by accident. The Roman historian Pliny wrote in A.D. 77 that Phoenician sailors placed “stones of soda ash” into a fire (presumably to rest their pots on) on a sandy beach. They later found a “hard, smooth stone” in the ashes. That’s one possible scenario, given that sand, soda ash (sodium carbonate), and heat are all ingredients for making glass. Another possibility is that potters inadvertently let some sand drift into their kilns, where it stuck to the wet clay, accidentally creating a hard, smooth glaze on the pottery when the baking was done.

However glassmaking was first discovered, historians agree that it happened about 6,000 years ago. The story of glassmaking after that is one of continuous technologic change: refining the recipe to create new types of glass, learning to shape it into new forms, and finding new and better uses for it.

GETTING INTO SHAPE

The first known methods used for shaping molten glass into objects were
drawing
and
casting
.

Calvin Coolidge had a pet bobcat named Smokey.

•
Glass drawing
. A metal hook is used to pull molten glass out of a tank while it is a very thick, red-hot liquid. In this state the glass can be drawn—much like taffy—into long thin strands, which are allowed to harden into rods or are cut into decorative beads while still soft.

•
Glass casting
. Molten glass is poured into a form and allowed to harden. The earliest glass molds were probably made of sand.

These methods are believed to have been first used by Sumerians in ancient Mesopotamia (Iraq and Syria) more than 5,000 years ago. Glass beads and simple cast pieces dating to approximately 3500 B.C. have been found in the region, and glassmaking instructions have even been discovered in ancient Sumerian texts. This new technology was passed around on trade routes to neighboring societies, and over the next 2,000 years, simple glassmaking spread across Mesopotamia and the Middle East.

CUP RUNNETH OVER

The next big leap for glassmaking was using it to make containers. Around 1500 B.C., Egyptian glassmakers discovered that they could dip solid cylinders of silica paste (made of crushed sand and water) into molten glass. They allowed the glass to harden and then broke the core out—thus making the first known glass containers. The method was improved by pouring molten glass over compacted sand forms, and later by another technique, known as glass pressing: molten glass was poured into a mold, and another mold was then pressed down into it. (This is still how many bottles are made today, but the process is done mechanically.)

A huge improvement over wood or clay containers, glass was put to many uses: as bottles for perfumes, dyes, and cosmetics; or as containers for carrying and preserving food and beverages such honey and wine.

ANCIENT BLOWHARDS

Around 30 B.C., craftsmen in Phoenicia (Lebanon and Syria) discovered that if they blew through a hollow metal tube into a lump of molten glass, it would inflate and take shape. Glassmaking would never be the same. It quickly changed from the limited use of crude molds to the seemingly infinite possibilities of glassblowing. Craftsmen could now produce a greater variety of wares for a greater variety of uses. And they could do it faster, easier, and cheaper than ever before.

According to historians, Asians didn’t kiss until the practice was introduced by Westerners.

At that time, Phoenicia was part of the Roman Empire. The Romans embraced the new technology and over the next several centuries spread it throughout their empire, including the Middle East, North Africa, and almost the whole of Europe. Glassblowing would remain the dominant way of making glass in these regions for almost the next 2,000 years.

CLEARING UP

Certain qualities of glass—color, transparency, and heat resistance, to name a few—are determined by the ingredients that are mixed with the silica. Through experimentation, these recipes gradually improved, and around A.D. 100 in Alexandria, Egypt, manganese oxide, a commonly found mineral, was added to the mix. Result: a formula for nearly transparent glass. This soon led to the use of glass for windows (although only in the most important buildings in the most important cities, like Rome and Alexandria). Early windows were usually cast, but some may have been made from
rolled glass:
molten glass poured on a flat surface and rolled out like dough. Either way, the first glass windows were thick, cloudy, and uneven—but they let in light and kept the weather out.

The fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century marked the beginning of the Dark Ages in Europe and a near-halt in the progress of glassmaking. But by the seventh century, new Muslim empires began to flourish in Asia and Africa. Over the next several centuries, Arab artisans, especially those from Syria, became the world’s premier glassmakers. They made huge advances in cutting, engraving, and coloring techniques, as well as inventing ways to paint, enamel, and gild glass. Intricately decorated, multicolored, gilded glass pieces from this era—especially vases in a wide variety of shapes—have been found in all parts of the Arab world. Even after dominance in the trade would shift back to Europe, European glassmakers were greatly influenced by the artistic and scientific advances of their Arab counterparts.

VENETIAN GLASS

Nobody knows exactly when glassmaking began in Venice, but by 1224 the city’s glassmakers had already formed a guild to protect their trade. By 1291 there were so many Venetian glassmakers that the furnaces were causing fires all over the city, which prompted the city council to move them all to the nearby island of Murano. This actually helped the guilds—they were better able to hide their advances from competitors. By the 14th century Venetian glassmakers were the world leaders in all aspects of the craft, including mastering the ingredients for making colored glass. For instance, the right amount of cobalt resulted in a deep blue glass; manganese made yellow or purple. One of their more significant achievements was the development of the clearest glass at that time,
cristallo
. And that led to the first glass lenses, developed in the Netherlands in 1590, which would eventually lead to the invention of eyeglasses, the telescope, and the microscope.

Ant lion larvae are called doodlebugs.

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND BEYOND

As with many other crafts, the change to factory-made, mass-produced glass meant a fatal blow to an artisan’s craft that had been practiced for thousands of years, but it also meant great leaps forward in quality.

• In 1820 a mechanized process of bottle production was introduced in the United States, greatly increasing the public’s familiarity with the use of glass.

• In 1876 John Jacob Bausch and Henry Lomb started Bausch and Lomb in Rochester, New York. They developed and refined many types of lenses for use in microscopes, eyeglasses, and magnifiers.

• In 1915 Corning Glass made the first heat-resistant glass for cookware, calling it Pyrex, from
pyro
, the Greek word for “fire.”

• In 1919 Henry Ford borrowed from a French invention, putting two layers of glass together with a very thin layer of cellulose in between. The resulting two-ply sheet was transparent and shatterproof. Ford ordered this “safety glass” put on all his cars. (Safety glass is made basically the same way today.)

• In 1926 Corning developed the “399” or “Ribbon” machine to make lightbulbs. It was soon capable of making 400,000 bulbs a day, more than five times the amount made by previous machines—which made lightbulbs affordable for ordinary households.

• In 1959 Britain’s Alastair Pilkington invented the “float process” for making sheet glass. A sheet of molten glass is drawn from a tank, then floated over the surface of a tank of molten tin and allowed to cool. This results in the smooth, lustrous, and consistent finish that consumers now expect—and take for granted—in windows. Nearly all sheet glass made today uses the float process.

Ulcers are more aggravated by decaf than by regular coffee.

• In 1970 Corning developed a workable silica optical fiber, an idea that had been around for decades. Used mostly for data transmission, this breakthrough jump-started the “fiber-optic” age.

GLASS PRESENT AND FUTURE

What’s next? A fairly recent development: “smart glass,” or glass coated with different substances that make it react to outside stimuli. You’ve probably seen
photochromic
glass—glass that responds to light—in self-darkening sunglasses.
Thermochromic
glass does the same thing in response to heat, and
electrochromic
, the most promising, responds to electricity; a flick of a switch can change the opaqueness of the glass or how it reflects light. Other techniques can even change the color of glass.

The science of glassmaking continues to advance. New methods are being discovered to produce glass faster and better; more uses for it are being found in computers, medical devices, and communications, to name a few. Thousands of years have passed since the discovery of that strange stone in the ashes of a fire. Who knows what uses the future holds for that simple but elegant substance—glass.

*        *        *

PAST-EGO EXPERIENCE

The 2003 book
Unlock Your Secret Dreams
by Craig Hamilton Parker unlocks some “past life” secrets of several stars:

• Sylvester Stallone believes in reincarnation and is convinced he was guillotined during the French Revolution.

• Englebert Humperdinck believes he was a Roman emperor.

• Tina Turner says she was told by a psychic that she’s the reincarnation of Hatshepsut, a female pharaoh in ancient Egypt.

• John Travolta believes he was once Rudolph Valentino.

Give thanks: There are 61 U.S. towns with names that include the word “turkey.”

HARD-BOILED

Here’s the story of Dashiell Hammett, the king of the crime novel
.

S
amuel Spade’s
jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down—from high flat temples—in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.

He said to Effie Perine: “Yes, sweetheart?”

She was a lanky sunburned girl whose tan dress of thin woolen stuff clung to her with an effect of dampness. Her eyes were brown and playful in a shiny boyish face. She finished shutting the door behind her, leaned against it, and said: “There’s a girl wants to see you. Her name’s Wonderly.”

“A customer?”

“I guess so. You’ll want to see her anyway: she’s a knockout.”

“Shoo her in, darling,” said Spade. “Shoo her in.”

Those are the opening lines from
The Maltese Falcon
, Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel, voted one of the 100 best novels in the English language by the Modern Library, and the one for which he’s most famous. Hammett’s looks were a far cry from Sam Spade’s: he was thin—and his short white hair and little black mustache made him look anything but tough. But like the rugged antiheroes in his detective stories, Hammett lived a hard life, drank heavily, and preferred to work alone. And his character showed in the stories he wrote for
Black Mask
magazine during the 1920s, which established him as the king of the hard-boiled mystery writers and the father of the film noir movie classics that followed. Although Hammett didn’t invent crime fiction, he wrote with such skill that his influence dominated it, elevating the genre to an art form. But that’s not how it started out.

Big Ma-a-a-c: In India, McDonald’s has no beef on the menu. (They do serve lamb burgers.)

PULP FICTION

Cheap adventure stories published in pocket-sized paperback books first appeared the mid-1800s. Publishing firms saved money by printing them on the cheapest paper available, made from pure wood pulp without any rag fiber (hence the term “pulp fiction”). The earliest were Western stories that featured frontier heroes, but as the Wild West was tamed, the cowboy’s urban counterpart began to emerge in the form of the streetwise detective. By the 1870s, the detective story had established itself as a genre. Serialized adventures of characters like Old Cap Collier, Broadway Billy, Jack Harkaway, and the mysterious Old Sleuth, Master of Disguise, helped to develop the style. These were hard-fisted, tough-guy heroes who inhabited a dark, urban underworld where violence seemed to be the only means of establishing order.