I find myself from time to time wondering how we discovered vitreous materials in the first place. Roaring fire on a mud flat perhaps? Kids putting random shit in campfires?
Very large bonfires might reach about 2000F. Sand melts to glass at 3000F.
Obsidian is volcanic glass. We might have also seen glass near meteorite impacts, or perhaps lightning strikes. If not from those natural phenomena, we might have discovered it as a side product of smelting copper, or perhaps some shop's apprentice messing around with the furnace.
Dirt in certain places has the right mix of minerals to melt at much lower temperatures than sand alone, and would have made melted lumps under large campfires. The source material might have been natural, or the side-effect of some other industry, such as slag from smelting.
You can imagine the sequence of steps: Kids playing with sticks pulling out the red-hot gooey mess. Trying to make the gooey things solidify into interesting shapes. Realising the results are durable and shiny, if a bit ugly in colour. Then experimenting with mixing different kinds of dirt and clay to change the colours. Eventually discovering that translucent is possible, then transparent, etc...
Note to self, if you have some game changing technology and only you know about it, pretend you have a nemesis who stole your secret and is in the process of notifying the Assyrians or the Soviets or the Martians or whatever
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 39.8 ms ] threadObsidian is volcanic glass. We might have also seen glass near meteorite impacts, or perhaps lightning strikes. If not from those natural phenomena, we might have discovered it as a side product of smelting copper, or perhaps some shop's apprentice messing around with the furnace.
My guess is that glass was discovered by someone trying to invent steel making.
You can imagine the sequence of steps: Kids playing with sticks pulling out the red-hot gooey mess. Trying to make the gooey things solidify into interesting shapes. Realising the results are durable and shiny, if a bit ugly in colour. Then experimenting with mixing different kinds of dirt and clay to change the colours. Eventually discovering that translucent is possible, then transparent, etc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_glass