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Introduction
Even though Roman merchants
were in close contact with the Hellenistic world by the early
2nd century B.C., they and several generations of their successors
took little or no interest in glass. The first use of a Latin
word for it-vitrum-occurs quite late, around 65 B.C.,
in the On the Nature of Things, by the poet Lucretius,
as he tried to explain how glass' most vital property of translucency
set it apart from other materials.
A couple of years before
Lucretius penned these ideas, however, a craftsman in Jerusalem
had realized that, if you took one of the glass tubes which
for centuries had been the stock for mass production of beads
and sealed it at one end (step A), then blew into it, you could create
a glass bulb (step B). If you blew hard enough and long enough, you
would create a small bottle. Herein lay the origins of glassblowing,
the technology that, up to recent decades, has dominated the
domestic side of modern glassmaking. It also was the technology
that provided Roman glassworking with its commercial viability.
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Ht., 8.3 cm Early 1st century B.C. Jewish Quarter Jerusalem's Old City
The Steps of Invention |
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REFERENCES
1) Grose, D.F., 1977: "Early Blown
Glass," Journal of Glass Studies 19, 9-29.
2) Haervernick,
T.E., 1967: "Die Verbreitung der Zaren Rippenschalen," Jarhrbuch
der Romisch-Germanische Zentralmuseums Mainz 14, 153-166.
3) Harden,
D.B., 1987: Glass of the Caesars, entries 45 and 68,
Milan: Olivetti.
4) Israeli,
Y., 1991: "The Invention of Blowing," in Roman Glass: Two
Centuries of Art and Invention, 46-55 (eds., M. Newby
and K. Painter) London: S.A.L.
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