Welcome to the Glass Age

170 elaborate (illuminated) copies of the bible needed lenses to complement their eyesight; alchemists needed elaborate glass equipment for experimentation; later gentleman scientists such as Newton and Faraday demanded lenses to create telescopes that could explore the solar system. Education for those sufficiently privileged goes back millennia. Indeed, education and knowledge are intertwined, as are knowledge and privilege. As society has become more egalitarian, education has slowly extended to a universal audience particularly during recent centuries and has taken on a wider scope. Schools, technical colleges and so on, have begun offering education for all. As knowledge has expanded in the last few centuries so specialist disciplines such as geology, chemistry and physics have grown apace and allowed people to better understand technical subjects such as glass making. Ownership of recipe books (and technology) created a veil of secrecy in the industry that limited progress. Figure 11.1. A Ruby glass drinking cup. It was used in the film ‘Heart of Crystal’ by the German Director Werner Herzog (1976) to create the saga of a 18 th -century Bavarian town, which produced Ruby Glass. When the only man who knew the secret to the production dies, the city goes into a great depression. The film illustrates how glass fabrication has been held in secret in past centuries. Source: Ana Candida Rodrigues, UFSCar/Federal University of São Carlos & CeRTEV. Glass artefacts have also featured in education and discovery in the Middle Ages: older monks creating artistically