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The Science of Glass

Published on: 6/19/2023

The chemical revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries brought greater understanding of the scientific principles of glassmaking. John Dalton’s atomic theory, the development of systematic chemical analysis by Jöns Jacob Berzelius, followed by chemical formulas and chemical equations, contributed to the establishment of large-scale industrial supply of purified raw materials.The Solvay process for producing soda ash was set up in 1863 in Belgium, and the development of concise chemical terminology the ambiguity and confusion of previous work. It was the French chemist Jean-Baptiste-André Dumas who showed in 1830 that the durability of soda-lime-silica glass was maximized when the ratio of the three materials was 1:1:6. In 1932 W.H. Zachariasen published The Atomic Arrangement in Glass, which had perhaps the most influence of any published work on glass science. Zachariasen’s work placed the understanding of glass structure and its relationship to composition on its modern footing