Glass manufacturers had spent centuries learning how to make flat glass. Now, they wanted to bend it into complex shapes—without marring its surface. Anything that touched the surface of the hot glass could leave a mark.

The most significant advance in glass production in over 2,000 years...      -American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 1983 Michael Owens, a self-taught American inventor, propelled the glass industry into the mechanical age. In 1903, he unveiled the world’s first completely automatic glass-forming machine—a machine for making bottles. Owens was determined to eliminate the hand delivery of hot glass to bottle machines. He was convinced that a machine could suck thick, molten glass from a rotating pot directly into its molds.

They make glass. By day and night, the fires burn on … and bid the sand let in the light.      -Carl Sandburg, In Reckless Ecstasy , 1904. To see the unseeable: the quest is unending. But lenses and prisms are only as good as their glass. Optical-quality glass must be flawless. Even tiny flecks, streaks, or bubbles can cause distortion. With World War II approaching, optical glass was in great demand, and making it was a slow, crude process. The ingredients were put in ceramic pots, melted, stirred, then cooled. Only about 10 percent of the glass was usable.

I have heard a ray of the sun laugh and cough and sing!     -Alexander Graham Bell It was a bright idea: use sunlight to transmit the human voice. In 1880, American innovator Alexander Graham Bell tried it, using a thin, flexible mirror to reflect a light beam onto a distant receiver. His voice caused the mirror—and the reflected light—to vibrate. The receiver detected the light’s vibrations and turned them back into sound. Bell’s photophone worked, but it wasn’t practical. Rain, smoke—anything in the atmosphere—scattered the unprotected light signal.

The world began to realize that so far it had only toyed with glass. Now a brand new material was born.     -Walter Kioulehn, Odyssey of the 41 Glassmakers , 1959 By the mid-1800s, there were still only two kinds of optical glass: soda-lime crown glass and lead-containing flint glass. Opticians doubted they’d ever have more choices. Then a German glass chemist made a crucial discovery. In 1884, Otto Schott proved he could precisely alter the optical properties of glass by changing its chemical makeup. The variations in glass, it now seemed, could be endless.

Edouard Benedictus, a set and costume designer for a French theater, wanted to make glass safer. He was disturbed by reports of people being disfigured by broken windshield glass during automobile accidents. How could windshields be made less dangerous?

A little more than 2,000 years ago, a Roman glassworker did something that dramatically changed the course of history. He blew a puff of air through a hollow %%rod%% into a gob of hot glass. The gob inflated into a bubble. At that moment, glassblowing was born.

Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins.    – Victor Hugo, Les Misérables , 1862 A glass lens. It’s nothing more than a curved piece of glass. So simple. So familiar. It’s changed the way we perceive the world. In 1608, when Dutch spectacle maker Hans Lippershey held up two lenses, one behind the other, he was surprised to see a close-up view of a distant steeple. He had discovered a powerful %%tool%%.

Why did such an important discovery occur so late in the … history of glass, and why was an accident necessary to bring it about?      – Donald Stookey, 1977 Crystals are usually a glassmaker’s enemy. When they form in glass, crystals can change the properties of the material in unwanted ways. Corning chemist Donald Stookey saw crystals differently. One night in 1954, he put a piece of experimental glass into a furnace. The next morning, he discovered that the furnace had overheated. He was sure he would find a pool of melted glass inside.

In 1879, the brilliant inventor Thomas Edison was on the verge of a breakthrough. He had discovered a slow-burning filament that would glow for hours in the vacuum of a glass globe. But to create the first practical electric light, he needed a glass globe that would not implode when the air