Ask A Scientist!


A recent application is to use glass fibers to transmit phone calls and to connect computer centers. There are many different kinds of glass and they are made in different manners.
However, the main ingredient is sand. An ancient Egyptian recipe to make glass is to mix sand, lime and soda. This mixture is heated until it becomes a liquid.
The Romans discovered in the first century BC that you can form thin bulbs of glass by gathering a blob of glass on the end of a long metal tube and then blowing into the tube, just like blowing bubble gum.
This discovery was a big step towards making glass windows. You still can see glass blowers at work when you visit the Corning Museum of Glass. They use this method to make beautiful vases, bowls, and glass sculptures.
When hot glass cools, it becomes stiffer and stiffer. In that regard, liquid glass is not like the liquids you know.
For example, water does not get noticeably stiffer when you cool it, but at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, suddenly turns to ice. Glass just continuously becomes more jelled.
At room temperature, glass is so stiff that it behaves in all applications like a very hard and brittle solid.
Tour guides in Europe like to tell the tourists that the old stained glass windows (and some are almost 1,000 years old) are thicker at the bottom edge because the glass has flowed a bit over the centuries.
But scientists, who have studied this issue, believe the glass was made that way originally.
Related Questions
- What is ceramic made of?
- What evidence do we have that continents were connected?
- How does a fluorescent light bulb work?
- Where does static electricity come from? How does it get in my cat's fur? Why is it worse in winter? How do dryer sheets get static out of clothes?
- If solids, like glass and ice, are made of tightly packed molecules, how can we see through them?
- What is the volume of water in a gallon of ice?
- How are radioisotopes used to battle cancer cells?
- Can particle accelerators accurately simulate conditions that occured during the Big Bang?
- Does magnetism work in space?
- Why do boomerangs come back when you throw them?









