History

In the early days people drank beer from cowhorns or pottery, tin, gold or silver cups. Glass as a natural product goes back to the thirth glacial era. The oldest glass object built by man, is part of a glass eye from an Egyptian statue, about 3500 years ago. About 1300 B.C. the Egyptians developed the technique to make glass bottle's. The heated and liquid glass was molded around a stick. The stick diameter would be the bottleneck's size. Because the making of glass went very slow, glass was a luxury item.

About 50 B.C. Roman people near Syria and Phoenica developed the technique of blowing glass. They discovered that a glass object could be blown when a large mass of molted glass was put at the end of a hollow pipe and blown into a hollow mold and shaped.This meant a revolution in the world of glass. The production became much faster and precise. Glass became now affordable for common people.

The Venetians made an art of glass blowing in the 12th century. They made glass called Cristallo. It was a perfectly clear, transparant and blinking glass and made the Venitians the main supplier of glass from about 1463 to around the 17th century. The question of how the Venetians produced cage cups remained open until the early 1960's, when fragments of a cage cup excavated at Corinth in Greece were examined under a microscope. It became obvious that the post and the wall had been cut from one piece of glass. The two elements could not have been assembled by fusing, since this would have left a visible join. The Venitians did make their cage cups by cutting and undercutting thick-walled glass blanks.

In the 18th century the English chemist Ravencroft had the idea to add leadoxidation to the glassmixture. This made the glass very transparent and gave it a nice shine. Since then there were no new revolutionary idea's and the production of glass has bin identical for over 200 years.

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