The Secret Of Ancient Roman Glass Blowing!

foreign [Music] is fascinating through this series I've been able to explore the origin and creation of many different materials from Ceramics to Copper bronze and iron but glass has always stood out as the most unique and challenging I First dove into the world of glass making eight years ago and in the years since I have been diving deeper and deeper into this topic I'm collecting new ingredients across many states in the country and getting help and advice from multiple glassblowers YouTubers and science authors after taking a Hiatus the past couple years I'm finally returning to this topic and Diving deeper than ever before because I realize I've only scratched the surface of understanding glass so I'm going for Baroque after several attempts of getting close but not quite there I'm not stopping until I can achieve the task of turning raw sand into workable material this is not going to be easy it's going to take a lot of resources it's going to take several attempts it's going to take meetings with some of the top experts in the world going Hands-On with their Recreations and hopefully if I can get everything to go right I can finally recreate the 3500 year old art of glass making thank you one of my biggest goals at the start was attempting to make optically clear glass along the way I found a very specific solution but in the grand picture of glass making I realize I've only scratched a surface on this material the solution I found two optically clear glass was using a combination of an electric kiln with a compound of borax as a flux resulting in a nearly perfect optically clear glass which I was unable to melt and cast into lenses for a camera ultimately the bottleneck for my glass making attempts has been reaching high enough temperatures for it normally requiring at least 2 300 degrees Fahrenheit most electric Kilns max out just below this temperature so only with a large amount of borax as a flux to lower the glass's melting point was I able to achieve these results the downside of this excess borax is that it causes the glass to be a much more runny liquid and pretty much unusable for glass blowing or anything really outside of casting greatly limiting my ability to utilize this material so with my reset series and taking things back to the fundamental origins of Technologies I Revisited glass making With A New Perspective trying to make last with ancient Technologies since then I've tried multiple ways to attempt to make glass from Cobb and brick furnaces to using charcoal and wood fuel all of these attempts have managed to just touch on the beginning temperature range of making glass each time getting little closer and closer but ultimately never forming actual glass at the end of last year I went about relocating my kiln and rebuilding it with a new design that would hopefully be more successful based on some additional research [Music] but first let's get the sand we'll need for turning into glass for that I got a unique invite by Creator save it for parts my name is Gabe I've got the save it for Parts Channel on YouTube to check out a nearby project that he and a group of people have been working on so this is sand land this particular part of it is the Sand Bar this has been a project I've been working on for probably a few years now digging out their own elaborate tunnel system in a Sandstone deposit telling out Sandstone for making glass is actually a common source of pure silica sand and for most of the 20th Century Ford tunneled out local Sandstone deposits near me in Minnesota for the windshields of the vehicles they manufactured here the other crucial ingredient for glass making is the flux a compound that lowers the melting point of glass I previously sourced several varieties before From the Ashes of hardwood trees the ashes of salt-loving plants and the salts from a Wyoming Lake with all the ingredients collected we are ready to finally dedicate another full day to trying to make glass it's a surprisingly exhausting and kind of expensive process you'll likely burn most of your exposed hair off and if everything doesn't quite come together perfectly there's a decent chance we'll end up with basically nothing so the Kiln we made now with a few layers of Cobb whole thing is a little bit smaller a little bit different Arrangement hopefully get a better result for our glass making this right here is going to be kind of the glory hole once it gets up to temperature we can do our glass working in theory from this hole right now I've been kind of preheating it with propane just to save on firewood and got around 700 degrees Fahrenheit which I think is a pretty good starting point time to switch to Wood and then here we have some of the sand I collected from sandland mixed in with some soda ash and you can see how well that turns out the sand is not quite as white as some of the other stuff we've gotten so I suspect it's going to be kind of probably green and the final result which is from the iron impurities in it so load these up I got a little bit of a shelf in here do you try and approve our odds of success we tried to put together a sophisticated Bellows based on a few historic designs using the watermelon I built in the Bellows good and basic made for me when I was last in Utah unfortunately because they weren't really built for each other I think the water mill was too large and the Bellows will look too small so while we got it to work unfortunately we didn't get a strong enough airflow so we ended up switching to an electric blower to hopefully give us that needed extra boost [Music] thank you [Music] they're about six hours into the burn and you can see our mid I think it's Crucible ended up breaking very unfortunate looks like it broke all the way through so I don't think we have anything on the bottom that's very unfortunate because that was the first one to melt and the most promising so it's been seven and a half hours take another peek at this it's getting there still pretty uh solid at this point it's gonna be pretty low so I think it's actually boiled down a lot that one is pretty good it's a maybe give it another hour [Music] so we're coming up on nine hours I think of the this melt and I think we're gonna do take a peek and hopefully have some natural glass this one's nice and gooey this is the sandlands mixture looks like it's still got a lot of bubbles in it but uh still pretty goopy yeah that one needs some more time I think [Music] as the night wore on and our firewood Supply started to run low it became obvious we were not going to be achieving success we were able to get a reading of at least 2100 degrees Fahrenheit so we were definitely achieving our highest temperatures yet and the glass was looking closer and closer to being fully formed chances are if we had the Manpower and the fuse Supply ready to continue running for another day we would likely achieve success but last we didn't and this turned into yet another near victory it seemed likely if we picked this up for one more day we could potentially achieve our goal but I want to once and for all achieve this difficult task so I made an impulsive last minute trip to visit the experts in the world's largest museum of all things glass the Corning Museum of Glass conveniently they fairly recently started exploring the same topic of ancient glassblowing and started doing demonstrations of Wood-Fired glass blowing for the summer so it was offered a rare chance to both talk to these experts and experience it firsthand to see what information I might be missing so I came to the museum with a long list of questions I wanted to see if they could answer and they connected me with several experts to interview but first they had me participate in their interactive glass making exhibit to help give me a bit of a refresher on my glassworking skills foreign [Music] from the sponsor that helps make travel like this possible magic spoon thanks to today's 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for any reason they'll refund your money no questions asked so click the link below and use a code how to make for five dollars off or go to magicspoon.com how to make to save five dollars today first up I wanted to talk about the origin of glass making where it started and how this art arose I'm hoping this will give me some Clues on this early process the history of glass is long the Corning Museum has an exhibit covering 35 centuries of glass making and Kate walked me through a large part of it the common theme I learned through everything is that making glasses hard and it's expensive it requires incredibly hot temperatures held for long periods of time that requires a lot of fuel to be sourced and then usually several non-stop days of people feeding and tending the fairness but where glass was discovered invented and then developed is largely a factor of how it could be found the economically worth the large amount of Labor and expense that it takes to produce it so the earliest glass dates back to about the 16th century BCE so 1500 1600 or so archaeologists sort of go back and forth on whether glass making starts in Egypt first or in in the area that's basically now modern Syria here's a chunk of raw glass from a famous site in Egypt called telemarno this is way before glassblowing starts what I found was fascinating is that this kind of presumption that glass was accidentally made one day and then they just figured out how to replicate it and use it the truth I learned is a little bit more complicated it involves a bit of an evolution of material most of these you'll notice are opaque translucent they're not colorless they're different materials and that's largely because glass is probably trying to imitate more precious materials lapis turquoise and later rock crystal which is when we get into the more colorless glasses it's still we think a little bit less expensive a little bit cheaper to produce than high quality materials from places like Afghanistan which is the only place you can get lapis lazuli in the ancient world this is a history of glass I never actually heard before the glass production first existed as basically counterfeiting precious gems but what I find fascinating is that I've actually made lapis lazuli using the chemical process those figured out the 1800s to produce ultramarine formerly one of the most expensive pigments in the world which seems crazy that it's actually possible to recreate this rare gem like they were trying but what's more crazy is that I'd say the process is actually easier than what they went through to accidentally invent glass till we get pieces like this that date to about 400 or 500 BCE or so these are the first true examples of glass that have been intentionally decolorized to look like rock crystal now we're in the Greek world and the word for glass has changed so it's no longer related to lapis lazuli it's now related to rock crystal so there's an emulation that's happening here I find it interesting that like myself making clear glass wasn't the initial result it wasn't until they tried to emulate other rare materials so there was an incentive to find ways to decolorize the glass so they're adding antimony like a form of antimony oxide in order to get the glass to be decolorized and to counteract the effects of that iron milk in the sand so most of the glass you're going to get these naturally colored blues and greens that are coming from the iron in the sand it really impacts whether you have an oxidizing or reducing environment so if you've got a oxidizing environment when you've got that oxygen free in the air you're going to end up with the more blues and greens from in your naturally colored iron-rich glass if you're in a reducing environment so you don't have a lot of that free oxygen available it's going to get more yellow and brown another question I had for them was about my ingredients I've emphasized a lot in my Journeys the importance of just the right ingredients and of chemically purifying them but I was curious what the process looked like in ancient times when purification wasn't always possible 8th 9th century so almost all glass making in the Mediterranean Roman world is centered in Egypt and what's now modern Israel and Lebanon because they had access in particular to these Sands that have the right kind of mix of silica and probably lime so we think that most of these glasses are really two ingredient glasses they're not three ingredients this is there the lime is coming in with the sand and they're not doing a lot of cleaning of it they're really as best we can tell just mixing the two bringing up to temperature for a long time initially glass was cast similar to bronze and other metals earliest evidence we have of glass blowing comes from a site in Jerusalem that dates to about the mid first century BCE or so and they're experimenting with glassblowing in a way that doesn't seem like it was really commercially viable skip forward about 50 years and we start to see early blown glass appearing in places like Rome in Northern Italy even in Switzerland so it spreads really quickly Bloom glass allows you to do is make a whole bunch of different varieties of shapes and forms that weren't possible before next I want to learn about the actual Kiln and refueling process my last minute trip fortunately allowed me to catch one of the last live demonstrations on Wood-Fired glass Lloyd they were doing at the Corning Glass Museum Eric first talked to me about the historical Kiln the museum first built in ran for their initial experiment it's just one historical record of what an ancient glass forming furnace looked like and it's on a little terracotta oil lamp so there's a depiction of glass workers working around a furnace like this and that's fundamentally what this is based on it really surprises people that you can melt less with wood it's not something that you think you could do that this would achieve temperatures high enough if you just built something that insulates a little bit and contains that heat then use the right sorts of fuels the right sorts of wood you can really achieve high temperatures the most of glass history glass making and glass blowing was done in separate processes and in different Kilns actually making the glass requires a higher heat and a longer burn cycle and it was generally more economical to do it in huge batches than pre-made glass could be formed into whatever desired shape and a smaller furnace the way they worked in the ancient world was to melt glass to let it cool to break it up and to send this raw material which today we call cullet to different glass making workshops around the Empire around the Roman Empire where that color would be reheated in a furnace like this and then formed into objects and you can melt from from batch in this furnace it's just hard to find it out right so you you need the higher temperatures really getting all the little bubbles which we call seeds out of the glass and making it really nice and clear you need those higher temperatures and you need to stay there longer for the public demonstration they rebuilt the Kiln in a more durable material so it can be used weekly without breaking this is 2.0 this is made out of modern materials got a 40 inch main body and then a 27 inch Stoke tunnel the ports and the the flu are being taken up by exhaust coming out the makeup air is coming through the Stoke tunnel and because there's a constriction it creates our draft I mean that's a pretty fair amount of velocity and so the the sort of ignou shape of having a big chamber in a small chamber will just naturally create that because this is this constriction becomes a high point of movement I'll light up at eight in the morning I'll start it gentle for 2 hours I'll do two hours to 500 or so and then in the next hour I'll ramp up to like eight nine a thousand once we hit about 11 then I kind of just start really stoking it it's like Off to the Races and we're trying to go Seventeen hundred to two thousand it's every 8 to 14 minutes I'm stoking I'm stirring and I made this sort of rake with that I'll dig all the way to the bottom at the far end pull I really rake pull things around I shuffle the top over and under and so I'll pull from the bottom and then push the top and I I try to I try to turn over my coals every 14 minutes we want to have about uh what would you say four or five inch bed of coals four five six inch bed of coals throughout the whole inner chamber and then uh we reserve the the second half of the The Stoke tunnel we'll put our new wood in and we lay it a lot in uh like a kind of cross hatch pattern so we get a lot of air movement in that air you can see the flame will be getting sucked in um and that's our draw and that really ramps up our heat you know for you wanting to hit those higher temperatures I think if you did it in that sort of a round shape and you did it out somewhere in the open so that you could put a flue on here you would create even more volume moving through more velocity and I think you would hit those temperatures we're using Ash it's hardwood it's nice it's hot and then the other key is is really it's chopping things small and so you'll see there's not like a lot of like full quarter rounds so everything is split pretty small it's a lot of chopping but it works out pretty good the furnace taught me every time we fired it the furnace has taught me some sort of a lesson where I was like oh man like I didn't see that or I didn't think that it proved its experience will just give you a ton of knowledge wisdom yeah you know yeah it teaches you [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign one major question I had going in was what the ideal source of fuel and air was for glass blowing I previously covered the importance of making charcoal and adding forced air to it which allows you to reach much higher temperatures needed for smelting Metals such as copper or steel at its surface a wood fire shouldn't be able to reach a high enough temperatures required for glass blowing however every reference I've seen says wood was a fuel source for glass making with no Bellows or forced air talking to everyone confirmed my suspicions though the answer to this question seems to not be the charcoal wouldn't work but that it's unnecessary going back to the main theme of the process it seems to be about economics producing charcoal is an extra step that adds more labor to the process adding the Bellows requires someone to either man the Bellows over multiple days of the burn continuously or you have to be limited to a location that has a water source to power the Bellows instead the most economic way to run a glass furnace was to construct the furnace where there was ample supplies of firewood and whenever that dried up you move to a new source and then you run your furnace in a way that allows the firewood to First burn into coals and in the process of burning produces enough heat that you have a natural draft and don't need Bellows before I left Corning New York I also paid a visit to the attached rakau research Library which contains the world's largest collection of media and all things glass it was explain to me that this is a place the library Congress calls if they ever have a question related to Glass I had a short window to visit before my flight and the Librarians basically piled upon me all the knowledge of glass I could ever want I tried to skim through as much as I could but I was honestly overwhelmed with a sudden exposure to all this new info particularly of interest to me was the original cuneiform tablets that supposedly have the oldest recipes for glass making Kate referred to it a few times when I talked to her American form tablets that date to about 700 800 BCE or so they're much more concerned with the fuel with like making sure that like information about the fuel and also the ritual that's associated with glass making so there's a little bit of like oh yeah and then we threw this stuff in but really we focused on the important stuff this also gave me a few Clues on possible issues in my process I completely omitted the Sheep sacrifice is required for a successful burn so if this still doesn't work I'm gonna have to try those steps too so we're back here at day two of the glass attempt with the furnace made a few modifications based on what I learned from the Corning big thing is adding kind of an igloo entrance and with that you put the fire in this right in the igloo and have it turn into coals and then you brush the coals back further that helps create a draw a big thing is we're also going to have this be a natural draw no Bellows no fan or anything they did suggest that we add a chimney just to increase that effect so we got a little bit of a chimney here [Music] in the back we have the working hole glory hole and that moved up just a little bit so we are working more with the hotter part of it I think this is a little bit taller than ours and the inside is a little bit bigger that also opens up this side chamber to potentially be used for annealing we have more airflow and in theory it should work a lot better and I think it's important to note that we did succeed in our first attempt we were reaching temperatures high enough to make last and it was just a matter of needing to do it for a long enough time so we're basically picking up right where we left off with the glasses pretty close to being ready to blow thanks to what I learned from the Corning Museum we were able to just make things a lot more efficient I think we should be able to get this up to temperature very quickly and hopefully do some more successful glass blowing the take away from reporting was it's all about the fuel you have to use the right type of wood of the right size and the right dryness or you'll never succeed and reach a high enough temperatures so we made sure to use only hardwood and Elliot chopped everything down to small pieces the second attempt ran a whole lot differently we're able to achieve a very strong graft without the use of bellows much to our surprise in the igloo shape and refueling strategy made feeding the fire a lot more manageable as you aren't feeding Straight Into The Inferno first attempt was a lot more explosive than the second attempt but the second attempt definitely went a lot better the additions to the furnace really helped out a lot just with keeping the fire going and it didn't need an electric blower that time the biggest surprise in learning curve was knowing that we didn't actually need forced air to fuel the whole thing and just the fact that we can run it on just cut Lumber as opposed to you know coal charcoal or some kind of fuel the idea that we have to run this for hours and hours and hours before we get everything up to temperature and get a good bed of cools built up in it and everything I think that was very surprising for me as well definitely a rite of passage getting our hair burnt off our arms a little less intense on the second try than it was the first yeah that first one we were kind of rock paper scissoring you see I don't want to I don't want to put the wood in you put the wood in all right I'll do it hold for as they progressed things still weren't turning out quite right like they did at Corning our pile of charcoal was getting massive and not burning down as fast as it did for them even with very aggressive raking towards the end the temperature was still lagging a lot lower than what we were aiming still hovering around 1800 degrees Fahrenheit despite learning all this new knowledge and making these new improvements it still seemed we were still going to fall short of success and not reach the necessary temperatures but then we ended up switching our wood supply to a different source and suddenly things took off and started shooting even more massive flames and the temperature finally started to climb to these higher temperatures the only issue was that we were at the end of our firewood Supply but Gabe from City for parts came in at the 11th hour with some of his wood to help us get us to the finish line [Music] as it started to get late into the night we were finally there our glass was hot and molted and I could take a decent gather on a blowpipe actually blowing the glass proved to be a bit of a challenge however mostly due to the arrangement of our furnace according they had some nice heat shields and equipment to cool the blow pipes our setup still needed some tweaking to get things just right attempting to blow the glass ended up with me pretty much continuously burning my hands there's also a struggle of maintaining the heat while we were blowing feeding it just at the right times to maintain the Heat [Music] they're cool [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] a few flaws in the actual film itself that make it a little bit hard to work and just kind of lacking some tools like rapidly cool but and just kind of experience is a big thing too I was able to do this with a lot of coaching and assistance in New York but on my own it's a little bit more challenging but they were able to have like a team it was like know exactly how to stoke it and how to work it and that kind of experience just takes time to learn so for the first time I think this is a massive success and very warm and I'm covered in Birds the end results aren't much to look at but this is still a pretty groundbreaking achievement with some more practice and tweaking it shouldn't take long before I can start actually making usable glass items myself out of sand thank you to the Corning Museum of Glass for their help and getting me to this Milestone and thank you to all of my supporters on patreon this was a massive project that took a lot longer it can cost more than ever but with your support I'm able to keep doing these deeper Dives with hopefully more success along the way so consider supporting if you want to see more videos like this [Music] enjoyed this video be sure to subscribe and check out check out content we have covering a wide variety of topics also if you've enjoyed these 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

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Length: 32min 23sec (1943 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 21 2023