Primitive Glassmaking (Creating Glass from Sand)

in the ongoing quest to rebuild ourselves through history we just recently began to cross over the threshold into the iron age iron is a challenging metal to master its formation and forging into useful tools but there is another material with an older origin than iron this proven to be the long arcane challenge for me for nearly the entire journey of this channel so far glass two years ago after several trips outsourcing raw ingredients and lots and lots of experimentation i finally figured out the secrets for making clear glass from scratch this was mostly a challenge of finding the right techniques and modern tools to use combined with sourcing the most effective chemical ingredients but it was still dependent on an electric kiln modern installation and other tools of today but now with my reset and the change of the scope of the channel the challenge begins anew needing to figure out and replicate how this difficult material was first discovered and mastered so let's start this journey all over again everything we use comes from 8 000 generations of collective innovation and discovery but could an average person figure it all out themselves and work their way from the stone age to today that's the question we're exploring each week i try to take the next step forward in human history my name is andy and this is how to make everything be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications so you don't miss the next step in this journey but first while on the topic of glass a word from today's sponsor of warby parker featuring one of the amazing innovations that came with the discovery of glass corby parker is committed to providing exceptional vision care online and in stores offering eyeglasses sunglasses eye exams and contact lenses classes start at 95 including prescription lenses sunglasses progressives and blue light lenses are also available choosing your frames is super easy with their quiz just answer a few questions you can start choosing a set of frames that best fits you it's going to try out a few different glasses online even use their app to try them on on my face and then got five different pairs sent to me to try them on show them to all my friends and see what was the best look for me ships free and includes a prepaid return shipping label [Music] their styles range from extra narrow to extra wide so it can fit pretty much any face shape [Music] try five pairs of glasses for free at home at warbyparker.com htme [Music] with early evidence leading its discovery and nearly 5000 years ago glass has a long history my earlier challenges with the material have been mostly about producing optically clear glass but that was a much later development early forms a glass turned out much more opaque and cloudy this type of material is going to be our first milestone origins of glass are likely in relation to its accidental discovery either from ceramics or metal working some early forms of glazes are very similar to glass making and effectively produce a layer of glass on the outside of ceramics which could have easily evolved into being used alone to make glass glass is often also a byproduct of metal production where impurities in the ore like sand can often be turned into a glassy slag there are in general two main components to glass silica sand and a flux the flux reduces the melting temperature of the glass makes the sand easier to melt and work with sand is relatively easy to procure the flux can be a bit difficult for an historical flux we paid a visit to the gulf of mexico well in the area and looked for a plant that often served this role off the coastal gulf of mexico from texas and we're on some of the salt marshes here and we're looking for a plant called the glasswart or saltwort it's a plant that grows near salt water and you can burn it the ashes will produce sodium carbonate which we use as a flux for making glass kind of the way it was originally done before modern processes were discovered so see here it's low tide right now water is receded so most likely along this edge here where its roots are getting saturated at high tide nice stick they make a nice a ladle some laundry detergent this might be it it looks at least very similar there's a lot of varieties of saltwater that can be used [Music] should we be worried about snakes probably for the sun said skaters and venomous snakes so probably don't do what we're doing see any gators over there all right so i'm relatively sure we have some of the salt wart right here the plant looks very similar to it possibly the same i'm not sure that's flatter leaves there's a berry just blindly eat this and see if it kills us it might be something else but it also would be growing in the same environment so it'd probably work this guy right here pretty sure is glasswart or at least the prickly the local variety of glasswarts which is also known as i believe red wort a red glass wart because it turns red burning these should be usable for making the soda ash or glass [Music] so [Music] all right so this is the glass wart that andy collected in texas we're looking for soda ash we've already burned it but after burning it we soak it in water strain it and then boil it and what's left is the soda ash [Music] witchcraft [Music] once the water is boiled off a relatively pure sample of soda ash should remain which can be used in the glass as the flux another very useful flux that ended up being a major key for making clear glass in my previous journey is borax a natural compound we were able to collect in california borax has an even lower melting point which makes the production of glass even easier well historically borax was available its use in glass came a lot later so for my first attempts i'm gonna be using this later knowledge to my advantage and then attempt to make a more historically accurate version of glass after i first succeed with borax in my previous experiments i found a roughly one to one to one ratio of these three ingredients to produce the best results my glass ingredients are ready to melt the next challenge is getting the right temperature ideally around to 2400 degrees fahrenheit having just constructed a cobb bloomery in our first iron smelting attempt which happens to operate at roughly the same temperature range and he attempted to repurpose the bloomery and see if we could turn it into a kiln hopefully able to melt our glass [Music] all right so after doing the iron mount we were able to salvage the bloomery and we kind of rebuilt it as more of a kiln we have a little chamber here with a shelf opens right up to the coals a little crucible here we have our sand and soda ash mix we're going to just put that in there and put it in proximity because we don't want the actual ash to get inside otherwise we'll probably just color our glass and make it mostly black don't need to go out quite as hot as steel but pretty close i think 2100 degrees fahrenheit is probably ideal to get everything melted glass making in ancient times is usually a two-step process first to make the glass and then actually turn the glass into something so we're just gonna do the first step right now and that's to make an actual glass start hitting it with bellows all right we've been running for a while let's check on inside is i think it's fused with we have partially formed glass crucible's pretty much half gone disintegrated so that's not great so one more big crucible try it again put it on the top and if we heat it slow enough it won't get uh directly heated by the coal i just want to close it directly on it if it's too hot so we slowly heat our way up from the top maybe we'll get something that is not a complete failure a worst case scenario maybe we'll get some glass we can pick out at the bottom take the bottom of the previous one and just kind of shove that in it's kind of a lid to stop too much ash from getting in there light it up and give it another shot hopefully it doesn't flip over okay [Music] maybe [Music] gooey partially formed glass and seems like mostly succeeded at making more of a glaze which was the precursor to the glass so almost [Music] a shiny turd [Laughter] [Music] glass but mixed with a lot of impurities let's say uh close but not quite there the failure of the first attempt seemed to primarily because of the very direct and uneven heating that was hitting the crucibles causing them to crack and break on the exposed side i'm not reaching the high temperature on the other side so for the next design i want to try getting the crucible directly over the heat with some amount of separation hopefully producing a much better result similar to this depiction i found of a kopala style kiln with the crucible sitting on a grate directly above the heat source i'm not sure where they put fish in there unfortunately the bloomery was unsalvageable after the second firing so i need to start over again i decided to invent a new building material that'll be a little bit more reusable bricks so using a ceramic brick mold lauren formed 120 bricks out of clay [Music] [Applause] ground fire pottery called grog is applied to the outside of the bricks to help prevent any cracking [Applause] then let them to dry for five days [Music] we made all these bricks but they're a bit wonky so i'm going to use the knife and shape them down trying to take the rougher edges off so that when you stack them to make the kiln it has more of a tighter seal [Music] [Applause] now to fire them and build the kiln i built a small fire and then surrounded it with all the unfired bricks [Applause] and slowly built up the fire to be hotter and hotter [Music] until finally sealing it up and letting it burn down overnight in the morning while suffering a few casualties resulted with bricks that are fired on the one side now take down the pile and build the kiln making sure to put the already fired face of the bricks on the outside using a mixture of sanding clay as a mortar i slowly build the kiln up taller and taller for the shelf grate we actually had a circular shelf and elise had made earlier for a bronze melt in the draft kiln that we had ultimately decided not to use and now could finally be put to use [Music] i built the kiln with a lower chamber for the fire and heat source with an opening to add more fuel and feed it forced air and an upper portion to hold the crucibles now to build a small fire to finish firing off the inside portion of the bricks once again sealing it off to burn down overnight [Music] with everything now set and ready to begin the actual glass melt i once again started a small fire in the kiln loaded up the crucibles and slowly built up the fire and the heat [Music] inside the chamber it's just below 500 degrees really good time to start putting in my crucibles and getting them warming up big one oh [Music] all right so the kiln all built and warmed up fired a few times see if the brick mostly fired as much as i could now lower it up with a couple of crucibles just have just a wood fire going right now we have two crucibles warming up it's about 500 degrees up here and eventually as it slowly gradual warms up we'll uh seal it up get a little bit hotter then we'll switch to charcoal and force air and i'll get it up to our final melting temperature around 2000 degrees a little bit over biggest challenge is gonna be the crucible's not cracking this time the whole structure not collapsing i guess it's got a few cracks in it it's not perfectly sealed unfortunately you could use another layer of mortar or whatever but we're gonna give it a shot and see how it turns out hopefully we can get a sizeable portion of glass this time inside one of the crucibles [Music] all right so completed the second kiln made out of bricks and ran a few issues with it it's definitely going to be a work in progress and getting the perfect kiln and hopefully now that we have bricks we can make it a little bit more reusable as i did i realized i had a few design flaws that i hadn't forethought should have had like another hole higher up where i could have fed it additional charcoal as it started to run out and possibly some sort of closable doors i think having some actual two years would have really helped potentially having multiple ones coming from different directions to all feed the charcoal all at once so you get maximum airflow ended up having the hole in the back kind of start to form so it's going to push it open to add more charcoal into it so i could feel it better and some firewood and that seemed to definitely help getting the temperature higher but it also created just a huge hole where all the heat and flames escape from so kind of decrease the efficiency of it unfortunately looks pretty cool giant flame shooting out of it but uh not the most efficient the challenge with this is definitely getting a hot enough heat to actually melt the glass but not too hot or too quickly too hot where it would crack the crucibles and lose everything with the bloomery the challenge was it got too hot too quick and kind of just destroyed the actual crucible and our result kind of just coated everything else you get a great result so this one we succeeded in maintaining the crucibles and not having them break and contain the contents but just looking on the outside i can tell they didn't fully melt but there's definitely some formation of glass starting in some of it reminder this is early forms of glass it's not going to be transparent it's going to be very cloudy it's going to have coloration to it it's kind of just the the very first forms of glass optically clear glass came a lot later so let's dump these out check them out and see how they turned out we have some glass starting to form along the edges and at the bottom here there's a piece of glass with a little guy that clearly was able to get to a little bit higher temperature and obviously a lot more of it kind of melted together it's a lot more glass like substance at the bottom hard to get out but see we can get this very cloudy chunk of glass here still has a bit of flux in it to be kind of ideal but this might be usable to actually start like glass working on so i think this could be considered a success so that is most definitely glass lauren what are you doing i'm just taking pictures for our instagram because we have an instagram and you should follow us on instagram oh yeah you guys should check that out instagram instagram instagram one of the big role blocks for this has been that we just don't really have a permanent space to do anything so everything we make kind of getting destroyed in the end but now with the bricks and some new developments should have a more permanent place where i can kind of just slowly improve it without having to go back to scratch with h1 so hopefully you can get some better long-term goals along the way having just barely reached the temperatures to make glass i'll next need to improve my setup to produce a higher and more controlled heat and then move on to making the tools needed for actually working and making something out of the glass thanks for joining this first step and what will likely be an ongoing challenge thank you to all of our supporters on patreon it's their support that make challenging projects like this possible if you want to see this project continue forward please consider supporting thanks for watching art cool more like shark if you enjoyed this video be sure to subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics also if you've enjoyed this series consider supporting us on patreon we are largely a fan funded channel and depend on the support of our viewers in order to keep our series going thanks for watching

Channel: How To Make Everything

Views: 1,249,713

Rating: 4.8105798 out of 5

Keywords: HTME, DIY, Fun, Smart, Learn, History, Science, Innovator, Educational, School, Invention, Industry, Technology, how to make everything, making glass from scratch, making glass from sand, making glass from sand at home, glassmaking, making glass, primitive technology, creating glass, creating glass from sand, creating glass from scratch, glass making, primitive glassmaking, glassmaking tutorial, glass tutorial, diy glass, diy glass tutorial, glass, sand, glassmaking asmr, brow tidy ox, maker

Id: Lg7kZpTVoms

Length: 19min 15sec (1155 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Last-Status-2291]

Are there any plans to have a "special episode" on how "HTME" is made? I'd be interested meeting the team, the idea and filming process, etc..