14 interesting facts about glass
- When glass breaks, the cracks move at speeds of up to 3,000 miles per hour.
- Glass takes over 1 million years to decompose in our landfills and dumps.
- Age man used obsidian (a naturally formed glass) for cutting tools and weapons.
- A glass is an amorphous (non-crystalline) solid material. Glasses are typically brittle, and often optically transparent.
- Recycling glass reduces air pollution by 20%, and water pollution by 50%.
- Hydrofluoric acid will dissolve glass.
- In 1500 bc, we believe the first glass bottles were made using the “Core-Forming Method”.
- Only 27% of the glass used in the United States is recycled. A typical glass recycling factory can recycle up to 20 tons of glass per hour.
- The energy saved from recycling 1 glass bottle can run a 100-watt bulb for 4 hours.
- Glass manufacture had developed in Venice by the time of the Crusades (A.D. 1096-1270), and by the 1290’s an elaborate guild system of glass workers had been set up.
- Thin-glass goblets can vibrate when hit by sound waves. This is due to resonance.
- Glass is commonly used for windows, bottles, modern hard drives and eyewear, and examples of glassy materials include soda-lime glass, borosilicate glass, acrylic glass, sugar glass, Muscovy-glass, and aluminium oxynitride.
- The largest glass furnaces produce more than 400 tonnes - more than 1 million bottles each day!
- The term glass developed in the late Roman Empire. It was in the Roman glassmaking center at Trier, now in modern Germany, that the late-Latin term glesum originated, probably from a Germanic word for a transparent, lustrous substance.
