When Were Glass Bottles Invented

Everybody uses glass bottles of some kind in their everyday life. Be it for storage of food items, drinking beverages, or repurposing them for other roles around their house. But how well do you know the history of the item you are using?

The history of glass is long and checkered, dating back to the earliest human civilization. We are going to do a quick recap of how glassmaking began and how it evolved over the years to become one of the most important industries known to man. If you have always been curious to know how things unfolded to what modern manufacturing processes are all about, then stick around to the end for this.

How Glass Making Began

The first glass was a naturally occurring element in the environment. Due to high pressures and high temperatures that have been part of forming and reforming the planet, conditions for creating glass would avail themselves in various instances, and this is how things like obsidian came to be.

It was this obsidian that opened the eyes of man when he encountered it for the first time. The shiny and smooth appearance of the rock became a catalyst for the earliest forms of civilization. It was used to fashion out weapons due to its hardness and sharpness, and the rest is history.

The first time people started experimenting with making glass from scratch was about 7000 BC in Mesopotamia, where master artisans began fashioning rudimentary forms of glass from sand. However, this was a limited form of glass since maintaining the high heat needed to melt sand to form glass was way too much for people in that era to pull off.  

The following is a detailed timeline of how glass making began and how it evolved over the years to become the most diversified industry known to the modern world.

● The first known glass bottle was made in 1500 BC in the land of Mesopotamia. This is where the technique of blowing air into hot gobs of glass to create hollowed spaces was first used, although the technique had been created in Syria some 1500 years before. It had never been used to make glass bottles until now.

● Ancient glass was made using Natron, a naturally occurring material that was composed of sodium carbonate decahydrate and a little touch of sodium sulfate and sodium chloride.

● Things started taking a new shape when the Romans got their hands-on glass-making techniques. They further refined the blowing style from the Syrians and started making the first form of commercial bottles that were mostly used to store wines. A big change from using earthen containers for this. The oldest unopened bottle of wine is a 1700-year-old Roman-made bottle that was discovered in Germany.

● The Roman techniques were lost for a while before they were reviewed by the North-Western and Central European inhabitants. They started mass-producing what was known as forest glass in their rudimentary factories for years, refining the art further as the years flew past.

● In the late middle ages, the first forms of transparent glass bottles were created in Southern Germany and Switzerland. Before that, all bottles used to be colored depending on the materials used to make them. No one had figured out making clear ones.

● After that, the pace of glass making rapidly accelerated around the world. Rumors have it that the first glass beer bottle was made by accident by Dr. Alexander Nowell in England in 1568. He had taken a sealed bottle of beer with him on a fishing trip but forgot it by the river bank. On returning the next day, he discovered the beer had been carbonated.

● George Ravenscroft, another Englishman, discovered the lead glass, and this opened up new possibilities for what glass containers could be used for. This replaced the Venetian glass that had been the standard for many years.

● In 1774, Joseph Priestly, a scientist, accidentally used a glass bottle to discover how oxygen can be detected. This again opened up the world of science, and it wasn't long before it was discovered that most glass bottles could be used to conduct experiments featuring chemicals that would have corroded any other material.

● Over the years, glass bottles have evolved into the most diverse equipment that has completely changed how people interact with their world.

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