Читать книгу Glass and Glass Manufacture онлайн

4 страница из 24

It affords me great pleasure to acknowledge the valuable aid that has been rendered me by Mr. S. N. Jenkinson, Professor Herbert Jackson, and Mr. Frederick Carder, to whom I am much indebted.

My thanks are also due to the following firms: Messrs. Melin & Co., Crutched Friars; The Hermansen Engineering Co., Birmingham; The Glass Engineering Co., Edinburgh; and Banks & Co., Edinburgh, who have kindly supplied me with illustrations.

PERCIVAL MARSON.

Craigentinny,

Edinburgh.

ssss1

The discovery of making glass is attributed to the early Phoenicians. Pliny relates that certain mariners who had a cargo of soda salt, having landed on the banks of a river in Palestine, started a fire to cook their food, and, not finding any stones to rest their pots on, they placed under them some lumps of the soda from their cargo. They found that the heat of their fire had melted the soda and fused it with the sand of the river bank, producing a transparent glass. The natives in the vicinity where this discovery was made in process of time carried on the practice of fusing sand with soda and other materials to make glass, until they succeeded in improving and bringing the art to a high degree of excellence. Discoveries amongst the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum present some first-rate examples of the skill attained by the ancients in glassmaking: glass was found to have been used there, admitting light into dwellings in the form of window glass.