All About Glass
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This is your resource for exploring various topics in glass: delve deeper with this collection of articles, multimedia, and virtual books all about glass. Content is frequently added to the area, so check back for new items. If you have a topic you'd like to see covered, send us your suggestion. If you have a specific question, Ask a Librarian at our Rakow Research Library.
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By about AD 20, Roman workers had discovered that a bubble of molten glass could be lowered into a mold and then further inflated to fill the mold. In this way, the full-size vessel, complete with elaborate decoration, was made almost instantly.
This was the common method of making small glass vessels from around 1500 BC until the discovery of glassblowing. Dung, clay, and glass came together in a seemingly odd process that was indispensable for more than a millennium and a half.
This technique was invented by Roman glassworkers. It was indispensable in glasshouses of the Middle Ages and flourished in Venice. Also known as dip molding, it remains popular today.
Discover the history and process of glass blowing with experts at the Corning Museum of Glass.
Arguably the most beautiful medieval glass vessel to survive, this goblet is also original. It is probably the invention of one glassblower who took the secret of its manufacture to his grave. See this extraordinarily elegant process, not rediscovered until the 20th century.
Grinding is a process of removal by abrasion. People were grinding stone tools long before the discovery of glassmaking.
Here is everything you might want to know about how cut glass gets its decoration. Battuto cutting, much loved by contemporary Venetian glass artists and their followers, is also shown. Incredibly ancient in origin, the process is still widely appealing.
Here is the easiest, most modern way of decorating the surface of a piece of glass. A young child can sandblast competently! In the hands of a sophisticated artist, though, effects both subtle and dramatic are possible.
Throughout glass history, workers have needed to saw pieces of glass cleanly. Using string and gritty mud-like slurry, ancient Egyptians and Greeks, for example, spent days accomplishing what the modern electric diamond saw does in seconds.
While the mechanization of pressing glass into a mold is a 19th-century American development, the basic process was known almost from the beginning of glassmaking. Here the process is shown in its simplest form, using an open-faced mold and molten glass.
