Without Glass
“Without glass, the world would be unrecognizable.”
So wrote Douglas Main in his fascinating April 2018 piece for The Atlantic. From hair-thin glass strands that allow signals of light to move through undersea and underground cable to the rugged smart phones faces, glass of today is made in more than 350,000 formulas. Each has special optical or structural properties that make our world, well, recognizable.
In a passage that particularly caught my eye, the writer recounted that glass was a serious business in the Roman Empire. Several thousand years after glassmaking had been invented,
