What is it about?
It is not exactly known when, where, or how humans first learned to make glass. The legends tells us that a Phoenician sailor (by other historians, a Roman sailor), cooking the evening meal on beach, sets the pots on top of stones of natron (a natural mixture of sodium carbonate decahydrate, sodium bicarbonate along with small quantities of household salt). As the cooking fire heated both these stones and the sand below, an unknown liquid began to flow and that was the origin of man-made glass.
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Why is it important?
Glass products have applications in design engineering, and they can solve many special problems. These materials can work in situations in which plastics and metals would fail and need to be part of designer’s repertoire. In some situations, by using these materials, some difficult problems would be solved.
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This page is a summary of: Glasses as engineering materials: A review, Materials & Design (1980-2015), April 2011, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.matdes.2010.11.057.
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