The Science of Glass
In Our Time
00:00
The History of Colour in Glass
One of the great reasons that the Romans liked glass was to make glass bottles because the Romans like wine still do. The problem is that the glasses that were made at that time were impure. And so the colours, these were sort of brownish, brownish green. Gradually, as people started to experiment with using different sands of different purities, they began to realise that they could control the colour of glass. Then making perfectly transparent glass was a major advance. Different impurities, like iron or manganese or chromium or copper, would cause the color of glass to change in specific ways. That then led to these specific additives that we used to create all of these beautifully
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