The Chinese, who have the four major inventions, why did they miss glass

Scientist Mark Miodownik wrote,The earliest glass was a creation of nature. When lightning strikes the desert, it generates a heat of more than 10,000 meters, and the sand melts, cools again, and forms glass. Due to the uneven heating of the sand and the large number of impurities, this type of glass has a rough appearance and a coke-like color.

But Libya's white desert is all pure quartz, and the crystal clear glass there is estimated to have been produced at extremely high temperatures from meteorite impacts, and its material is no different from that of today's man-made glass. Archaeological discoveries have found that the Egyptian pharaohs used this desert glass from 26 million years ago to make their royal totem scarab.

Who made the first piece of artificial glass? There is no way to verify. Since it takes more than 1,200 degrees to melt sand, compared to about 800 for a normal flame, it is conceivable that glass is subject to important conditions such as fuel and furnaces.

That is, it cannot be as old as pottery. The latter is 29,000 years old, while it is estimated that glass originated as early as 8,000 BC. At that time, pottery began to glaze, and the so-called "glaze" is a thin layer of glass covering the surface of the ceramic.

In fact, the introduction of glass technology into China is not too late, in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period of the noble tombs, from time to time found fired glass ornaments. In China since then, glass has not been absent. However, most scholars admit that the Chinese have never valued glass as a material.

Miodoric put it this way: "After the collapse of the Roman Empire, the development of material technology by the Chinese was 1,000 years ahead of the West. They were experts in the development of paper, wood, ceramics and metals, but they ignored glass.

Some people believe that it is the "competitive monopoly" of craft products such as ceramics that has attracted the interest of the Chinese.

Glass was invented by Naf. They use natural baking soda to make pot stands when cooking.

under the action of flames, with quartz sand on the beach.

A chemical reaction occurs.

And the resulting substance, this is the earliest glass. Later, the Phoenicians made a fortune by mixing quartz sand with natural soda and melting it in a special furnace to make glass balls.

Applications of glassGlass is an indispensable material in our lives. The windows, lampshades, and bulbs of various buildings, glass bottles, glasses, glass mirrors, glass plates, and various glass instruments used in chemistry and other scientific research work are all masterpieces of glass. The use of glass in decoration is very common, from exterior wall windows to indoor screens, door leaves, etc.

The first people to make glass were the ancient Egyptians. Glass has been used for more than 4,000 years.

Around the 4th century, the ancient Romans began to use glass on doors and windows, and by 1291, Italian glass-making technology was very advanced.

In the 12th century AD, commercial glass appeared and began to become an industrial material.

In 1688, a man named Naf invented the process of making large pieces of glass, and from then on, glass became an ordinary object.

The glass production process mainly includes:

Pre-processing of raw materials. The bulk raw material (quartz sand.

Soda ash, limestone, feldspar, etc.) are crushed to dry the wet raw materials, and the iron-containing raw materials are treated to remove iron to ensure the quality of the glass.

Batch preparation.

Melting. Glass batches in a pond kiln or crucible.

The kiln is heated at a high temperature (1550 1600 degrees) to form a uniform, bubble-free liquid glass that meets the molding requirements.

Molding. Liquid glass is processed into products of the required shape, such as flat plates, various utensils, etc.

Heat treatment. Through annealing, quenching and other processes, the stress, phase separation or crystallization inside the glass is eliminated or generated, and the structural state of the glass is changed.

The technology of making glass was invented by the Egyptians and Mesopotamians between 3400 and 2500 BC. The origin may be that they inadvertently or intentionally mixed trona with quartz sand and baked it to obtain the original crude slope glass. At that time, almost all glass was colored and not very transparent.

Later, people gradually used it to make various decorations, wine glasses, bottles and jars, etc.

Before the Common Era, the technology of making glass was introduced to Rome in Egypt, and the Romans reformed the manufacturing technology. They used a furnace instead of a pot to raise the temperature so that the raw material was completely melted into a liquid state, improving the quality of the glass. At the same time, blowpipes and blowing techniques were invented, resulting in transparent and beautiful glass products.

Later, they deliberately added metallic elements such as iron and copper to the raw materials to make stained glass.

The emergence of various glass products not only enriched people's lives, but also provided utensils and conditions for the development of alchemy and medicinal chemistry.

The world's earliest glassmakers were the ancient Egyptians. The appearance and use of glass has a history of more than 4,000 years in human life, from the ruins of Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt 4,000 years ago, there have been small glass beads unearthed.

In the 12th century AD, commercial glass appeared and began to become an industrial material. In the 18th century, optical glass was produced to meet the needs of making telescopes. In 1874, Belgium was the first to produce flat glass.

Glass is an amorphous inorganic non-metallic material, which is generally made of a variety of inorganic minerals (such as quartz sand, borax, boric acid, barite, barium, barium carbonate, limestone, feldspar, soda ash, etc.) as the main raw material, and a small amount of auxiliary raw materials are added. Its main components are silica and other oxides.

No one knows exactly when and where glass was first made. Around 2600 BC, it emerged in one of the early centers of civilization in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) or Egypt.

Glass is made from sand, limestone, and sodium carbonate and a mixture, and while we usually think of glass as a clear and clear substance, ancient glass was not transparent. It has a bit of color because of the impurities in the mixture, but these colors are usually very beautiful.

The ancient Egyptians were excellent artists in the manufacture of glass vials and ornaments, and they often made layers of different colors, and Egyptian glass bottles from the 18th Dynasty (1570-1320 BC) are still preserved.

Blown glassware, or taking a mass of semi-liquid molten glass, blowing air into it to make a hollow container, was a later invention. The first glassblowing workers probably appeared in Syria in the 1st century BC.

The glass window is even a later invention. They were also originally made by blowing. The large container is blown out and flattened to become a piece of glass.

This bright glass began to appear around 100 AD, but for more than 1,000 years it was considered an expensive luxury.

An old-fashioned round skylight with a ring mark in the middle of the pane glass was originally made by flattening the bottom of a blown round glassware while it was still hot.

The invention process of glass has a legendary story:

One sunny day a long time ago, a large Phoenician merchant ship came to the mouth of the Belus River on the Mediterranean coast with many crystals of natural soda. The crew did not know the law of the rise and fall of the sea here. When the boat reached a beautiful sandbar not far from the mouth of the river, it ran aground.

The Phoenicians, trapped in the boat, simply jumped off the big boat and ran to this beautiful sandbar, playing as they pleased, while waiting for the high tide to continue sailing. When noon came, they decided to bury a pot on the sandbar to make rice. But the sandbar was full of soft sand, and there were no stones to be found.

Someone suddenly remembered the natural crystalline soda on the boat, so everyone worked together, moved dozens of pieces to build a stove, and then set up firewood and lit it. The meal was quickly ready. When they finished eating, packed up the dishes and prepared to return to the ship, they suddenly discovered a wonderful phenomenon:

I saw that there was something shining on the sand under the pot, which was very cute. Everyone didn't know what it was, and they thought they had found a treasure, so they kept it away. In fact, when cooking on a fire, the soda block supporting the pot reacts chemically with the quartz sand on the ground at high temperatures to form glass.

When the clever Phoenicians discovered this secret by accident, they quickly learned how to make it, mixing quartz sand with natural soda, melting them in a special furnace, and then turning the liquid glass into large and small glass beads. These good-looking beads quickly became popular with foreigners, and some wealthy people even exchanged them for ** and jewelry, and the Phoenicians made a fortune from it.

In fact, as early as 2000 BC, the Mesopotamians began to produce simple glassware, and real glassware appeared in Egypt in 1500 BC. From the 9th century BC onwards, the glass manufacturing industry flourished. By the 6th century AD, there were glassworks on the islands of Rhodes and Cyprus.

The city of Alexandria, founded in 332 BC, was an important city for the production of glass at that time.

From the 7th century onwards, some Arab countries such as Mesopotamia, Persia, Egypt and Syria also had a thriving glassmaking industry. They were already able to make mosque lamps out of clear glass or stained glass.

In Europe, glass manufacturing emerged relatively late. Until about the 18th century, Europeans bought high-end glassware from Venice. This situation gradually changed in the 18th century when the European Ravenskrot invented a more transparent aluminum glass, and the glass industry flourished in Europe.

Naf. In 1688, a man named Nav invented the process of making large pieces of glass.

The world's earliest glassmakers were the ancient Egyptians. The appearance and use of glass in human life has a history of more than 4,000 years, from the ruins of ancient Egypt 4,000 years ago, there have been small glass beads unearthed.

Far.

Five or six thousand years ago, the Egyptians first invented fired glass, which later spread throughout the European continent. Initially, it was thought that Chinese glass was also introduced from the West. But archaeological discoveries broke this view, and in 1965, a Shang Dynasty blue glaze printed Zun was unearthed in Henan, with five pieces of dark green thick and transparent glass glaze.

In 1975, in the early and middle tombs of the Western Zhou Dynasty in Rujiazhuang, Baoji, thousands of pieces of glazed tubes and beads were unearthed, and the identification of ancient objects by Chinese and foreign scientists was lead barium glass, which is different from the soda-lime glass of the West, and the glass of China is developed from its own system. Archaeological discoveries also tell us that glass in China was later than in Egypt, that it sprouted in the Shang Dynasty and that it had already begun to be fired in the Western Zhou Dynasty at the latest. According to the Biography of Mu Tianzi, King Mu of Zhou climbed the mountain of quarrying and ordered the people to quarry and cast as a tool, which is to burn glass.

However, in the early days of glass in our country, the ancients called it Xuanlin, Liuli, Glass, Biliuli, Yaoyu, Water Essence, Jar Jade, etc., after the Northern and Southern Dynasties, sometimes called Glass, Feeder. It was called glass in the Qing Dynasty. In ancient times, the glass included three things:

One is a translucent jade, the second is a glaze made of silicic acid compounds of aluminum and sodium, and the third refers to glass. The invention of glass should be related to the firing of ceramics and the smelting of bronze. The inventor is also a master craftsman who makes pottery or bronze.

The glass of ancient Egypt was a pottery craftsman, and when he took the pottery out of the kiln, he found something shiny inside the kiln. After careful research and many experiments, the glass was fired. In China, when firing ceramics or smelting bronze, the temperature in the kiln could reach 1100