GLASS MAKING
VII. A LOOK THROUGH A WINDOW INTO ONE OF NATURE'S
When you make taffy, you drop a spoonful of the boiling mixture into a glass of cold water to find out when it is just right to pull. Wouldn’t it surprise you to learn that the glass itself was made in much the same way as you make taffy? First the materials are boiled together until the mixture is just right to pour into moulds, or to be stretched into bubbles or rolled into plates.
This seems strange of anything as hard and brittle glass, doesn’t it? But, in the great world of things that men make, it seems to be much as it is in the world that nature makes. There are only a few ways of doing things. The man who invented the spinning frame for making cotton yarn got the idea in an iron rolling mil1. And there are only a few things to make everything out of. These are the elements of the earth, the air and water. So when we speak of men making things, we do not really mean what we say. All men can do is to take the things that are already made and combine them in new ways, or make new uses of them. Very, very often they merely find things that never were hidden.
Glass is one of the things that was found. No one knows just where or how it was found first. But very likely it was in Egypt, where the soil is mostly sand. You have noticed how sand shines, how it glares under the sun. Glass and glaze and glare all mean much the same thing. Now, in Egypt, straw stacks were often burned. In the ashes lumps of glass were found. If you were to find a lump of glass in ashes today, you would naturally think it a bottle that had been melted in the fire. But in old Egypt there were no bottles, no manufactured glass at all. The straw stacks of Egypt stood on sandy soil. Sand melted alone does not make glass, but when mixed with soda it does. There is soda, or potash, in ashes. The ashes of the straw, fused with the sand, very likely, and hardened into lumps of glass. And, besides, there is some glass, or silica, in straw itself, and in many other plants. Did you ever cut your hand on the sharp,
