Glass is a naturally occurring noncorrosive, semiopaque substance fused by the heat of volcanic eruptions or lightning strikes. It is believed to be accidentally discovered by humans around 5000BC when Phoenician merchants, while feasting on a beach, could find no stones on which to place their cooking pots. They set them on blocks of soda carried by their ship as cargo. The soda blocks, melted by the heat of the fire, mixed with the sand and turned into molted glass. The intentional glass making involves precisely the same recipe: heat, sand and soda ash.

The mysterious physical and aesthetic properties of glass have always intrigued men. From the time of its discovery to the invention of the blowing pipe and to the emergence of the automated glass blowing machine, glass has become inexpensive and widely available. Yet this solid material, which has the random atomic arrangement of liquid that is sort of frozen into permanent substance, continues to fascinate even the most sophisticated modern men when it