where does glass orginate? or where is glass from?

Answer 1

Glass is sand - a very high quality silica sand, to which other materials are added. The resulting mixture is called a batch. Some of the other materials included in the batch are salt cake, limestone, dolomite, feldspar, soda ash and powdered cullet. Cullet is broken glass. It can be left over from a previous batch or from the edges that remain after a batch of glass has been formed and cut to size. Adding cullet helps the batch melt more easily.

Glass is made by melting and cooling the batch. As the batch cools, it becomes solid without forming crystals. Crystals are three-dimensional building blocks that make a substance internally rigid. The lack of crystals makes glass technically a liquid, not a solid. It also makes glass transparent.

These sites have more information.

Answer 2

Here's what I found on google:
According to the ancient-Roman historian Pliny (AD 23-79), Phoenician merchants transporting stone actually discovered glass (or rather became aware of its existence accidentally) in the region of Syria around 5000 BC. Pliny tells how the merchants, after landing, rested cooking pots on blocks of nitrate placed by their fire. With the intense heat of the fire, the blocks eventually melted and mixed with the sand of the beach to form an opaque liquid.

This brief history looks, however, at the origins and evolution of man-made glass.
5000 BC

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A craft is born
The earliest man-made glass objects, mainly non-transparent glass beads, are thought to date back to around 3500 BC, with finds in Egypt and Eastern Mesopotamia. In the third millennium, in central Mesopotamia, the basic raw materials of glass were being used principally to produce glazes on pots and vases. The discovery may have been coincidental, with calciferous sand finding its way into an overheated kiln and combining with soda to form a coloured glaze on the ceramics. It was then, above all, Phoenician merchants and sailors who spread this new art along the coasts of the Mediterranean.

From: http://www.glassonline.com/infoserv/history.html

By the way, glass is considered to be a liquid, as glass made by the ancient Greeks has flowed: that is a pane (sheet of glass) has become thinner at the top and thicker at the bottom: it has flowed downwards.

Answer 3

As sung in U2's "Lemon".. "A man melts the sand so he can see the world outside." Glass is melted sand.

Answer 4

Silica PS GLASS IT NOT A CRYSTAL, it is an Amorphous solid.

Answer 5

Glass is sand.

Answer 6

I think sand

Answer 7

silicia - sand

Answer 8

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass

Everything you need to know.

Answer 9

Glass is a noncrystalline material that can maintain indefinitely, if left undisturbed, its overall form and amorphous microstructure at a temperature below its glass transition temperature. The standard definition of a glass (or vitreous solid) requires the solid phase to be formed by rapid melt quenching[1]. Glass is therefore formed via a supercooled liquid and cooled sufficiently rapidly from its molten state through its glass transition temperature, Tg, that the supercooled disordered atomic configuration at Tg, is frozen into the solid state. Generally, the structure of a glass exists in a metastable state with respect to its crystalline form, although in certain circumstances, for example in atactic polymers, there is no crystalline analogue of the amorphous phase [2]. By definition as an amorphous solid, the atomic structure of a glass lacks any long range translational periodicity. However, by virtue of the local chemical bonding constraints glasses do possess a high degree of short-range order with respect to local atomic polyhedra[3]. Amorphous solids may also be formed by methods other than melt quenching, such as vapour deposition or the sol-gel method.

The common form of glass used for household objects such as light bulbs and windows contain about 70–72 % by weight of silicon dioxide (SiO2). The most common form of glass is soda-lime glass, which contains nearly 30 % sodium and calcium oxides or carbonates. Pyrex is borosilicate glass containing about 10 % boric oxide. Lead crystal is a form of lead glass that contains a minimum of 24 % lead oxide. Silica glass may be produced by using sand as a raw material (or "quartz sand") that contains almost 100 % crystalline silica in the form of quartz. Although it is almost pure quartz, it may still contain a small amount (less than 1 %) of iron oxides that would color the glass, so this sand is usually depleted before production to reduce the iron oxide amount to less than 0.05 %. Large natural single crystals of quartz are pure silicon dioxide, and upon crushing are used for high quality specialty glasses. Synthetic amorphous silica, an almost 100 % pure form of quartz, is the raw material for the most expensive specialty glasses. The most common method for glass production is using molten tin, where the molten glass floats on top of the tin, thus giving it the name "float glass". Glass may be formed into smooth and impervious surfaces. Under tension, glass is brittle and will break into sharp shards. Under compression, pure glass can withstand a great amount of force. The properties of glass can be modified or changed with the addition of other compounds or heat treatment.

The most obvious characteristic of ordinary glass is that it is transparent to visible light (not all glassy materials are). This transparency is due to an absence of electronic transition states in the range of visible light, and because ordinary glass is homogeneous on all length scales greater than about a wavelength of visible light. (Heterogeneities cause light to be scattered, breaking up any coherent image transmission). Ordinary glass partially blocks UVA (wavelength between 400 and 300 nm) and completely blocks UVC and UVB (wavelengths shorter than 300 nm) due to the addition of compounds such as soda ash (sodium carbonate).

Pure SiO2 glass (the same chemical compound as quartz, or, in its polycrystalline form, sand) does not absorb UV light and is used for applications that require transparency in this region, although it is more expensive. This type of glass can be made so pure that when made into fibre optic cables, hundreds of kilometres of glass are transparent at infrared wavelengths. Individual fibres are given an equally transparent core of SiO2/GeO2 glass, which has only slightly different optical properties (the germanium contributing to a higher index of refraction). Undersea cables have sections doped with erbium, which amplify transmitted signals by laser emission from within the glass itself. Amorphous SiO2 is also used as a dielectric material in integrated circuits due to the smooth and electrically neutral interface it forms with silicon.

Glasses used for making optical devices are categorized using a six-digit glass code, or alternatively a letter-number code from the Schott Glass catalogue. For example, BK7 is a low-dispersion borosilicate crown glass, and SF10 is a high-dispersion dense flint glass. The glasses are arranged by composition, refractive index, and Abbe number.

Glass is sometimes created naturally from volcanic magma. This glass is called obsidian, and is usually black with impurities. Obsidian is a raw material for flintknappers, who have used it to make extremely sharp knives since the stone age. Collecting obsidian from national parks and other locations may be prohibited by law in some countries, but the same toolmaking techniques can be applied to industrially-made glass.

Pure silica (SiO2) has a melting point of about 2,000° C (3,632° F). While pure silica can be made into glass for special applications (see fused quartz), other substances are added to common glass to simplify processing. One is sodium carbonate (Na2CO3), which lowers the melting point to about 1,000° C (1,832° F); "soda" refers to the original source of sodium carbonate in the soda ash obtained from certain plants. However, the soda makes the glass water soluble, which is usually undesirable, so "lime" (calcium oxide (CaO), generally obtained from limestone), some magnesium oxide (MgO) and aluminum oxide are added to provide for a better chemical durability. The resulting glass contains about 70 to 72 percent silica by weight and is called a soda-lime glass. Soda-lime glasses account for about 90 percent of manufactured glass.

As well as soda and lime, most common glass has other ingredients added to change its properties. Lead glass, such as lead crystal or flint glass, is more 'brilliant' because the increased refractive index causes noticeably more "sparkles", while boron may be added to change the thermal and electrical properties, as in Pyrex. Adding barium also increases the refractive index. Thorium oxide gives glass a high refractive index and low dispersion, and was formerly used in producing high-quality lenses, but due to its radioactivity has been replaced by lanthanum oxide in modern glasses. Large amounts of iron are used in glass that absorbs infrared energy, such as heat absorbing filters for movie projectors, while cerium(IV) oxide can be used for glass that absorbs UV wavelengths (biologically damaging ionizing radiation).

Glasses that do not include silica as a major constituent are sometimes used for fibre optics and other specialized technical applications. These include fluorozirconate, fluoroaluminate, and chalcogenide glasses.

In 2006 Italian scientists created a new type of glass using extreme pressure and carbon dioxide. The substance was named amorphous carbonia(a-CO2) which has an atomic structure resembling that of ordinary window glass