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Glass made the transition from ornament to advanced technology during the height of the Roman Empire in the first and second centuries. That's when glassmakers figured out ways to produce sturdier and less cloudy material than the natural glass used in King Tut's scarab. Roman craftsmen shaped the melted silica into drinking and storage vessels and windowpanes, the very first ones built.
This pectoral, a type of jewelry, was unearthed in the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun.
Roman glass from the second century. Many ancient civilizations had the ability to make glass items, but they were opaque and often colored.
Jump ahead a millennium and east to Constantinople, a wealthy city that is now Istanbul, Turkey. A holy war that caused the siege and destruction of this city in 1204 was one of those historical quakes that send tremors of influence rippling across the globe. It also sent a small community of glassmakers from Turkey westward across the Mediterranean; they landed in the Republic of Venice, a prosperous city on the shores of the Adriatic Sea.
In the thirteenth century, Venice was the most important commercial trading hub in the world. The Turkish glassmakers who settled there and stoked their blazingly hot furnaces created new luxury goods for merchants to sell around the globe. They also accidentally burned down neighborhoods.
In 1291, in an effort to retain the profitable skills of the glassmakers and protect public safety, the Venetian government ordered the Turks to relocate a mile across the Venetian Lagoon to the island of Murano. Unwittingly, they created what we now call an “innovation hub”: a place like Silicon Valley, where new ideas and technologies tend to prosper.
Economists have a term for this phenomenon: “information spillover.” Pack people together and ideas have a natural tendency to flow from mind to mind. Murano was densely populated, which meant that new ideas about glassmaking spread quickly, especially since many of the glassmakers were related. The success of Murano was shaped by sharing as much as by competition.
One member of that creative community, Murano glassmaker Angelo Barovier, clearly made one of the major breakthroughs in glass. And “clear” was what he sought. After years of trial and error with different substances, Barovier burned saltwort, a mineral-rich plant he had imported from Syria hundreds of miles away; extracted the minerals from the ashes; and added them to molten glass. When the mixture cooled, it created an extraordinary type of glass: you could see through it. This was the birth of modern glass.
By the 1300s, Murano had become known as the Isle of Glass, and its ornate vases and other exquisite glassware became status symbols throughout Western Europe. Glassmakers still work there today, and many are direct descendants of the original families that emigrated from Turkey.
Today, of course, we take it for granted that glass is a transparent material, and we're so accustomed to seeing glass everywhere in our world that we don't even think of it as a technological advance. But eight hundred years ago, the ability to create transparent glass made Murano one of the most technologically advanced places on the planet, and Barovier's breakthrough would turn out to be far more important than he could have realized.
As we now know, most materials absorb the energy of light. But because of its composition, silicon dioxide allows light to pass through. That's why glass is transparent. It can also be used to bend, distort, or even break up light waves. This property of glass turned out to be even more revolutionary than simple transparency.