Glass Blowing

Glassblowing is a glassforming technique that involves inflating the molten glass into a glass blob with the aid of the blowpipe. A person who blows glass is called a glassblower, glassmith, or gaffer. more...

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Technology

Principles

As a novel glass forming technique created in the middle of the first century B.C.,glassblowing exploited a working property of glass which was previously unknown to the glassworkers – inflation. Inflation refers to the expansion of a molten blob of glass by introducing a small amount of air to it. This property is based on the liquid structure of glass where the atoms are held together by strong chemical bonds in a disordered and random network , therefore molten glass is viscous enough to be blown and gradually hardens as it loses heat . In order to increase the stiffness of the molten glass which in turn facilitates the process of blowing, there is a subtle change in the composition of glass. With reference to their studies of the glass assemblages from Sepphoris of Israel, Fischer and McCray postulated that the concentration of natron, which acts as flux in glass, is slightly lower in blown vessels than those manufactured by casting. Lower concentration of natron would have allowed the glass to be stiffer for blowing. A full range of glassblowing techniques was developed within decades of its invention and the two major methods of glassblowing are as follow:

Free-blowing

This method held a pre-eminent position in glassforming ever since its introduction in the middle of the first century B.C. until the late nineteenth century and is still widely used nowadays as a glassforming technique. The process of free-blowing involves the blowing of short puffs of air into a molten portion of glass which is gathered at one end of the blowpipe. This has the effect of forming an elastic skin on the interior of the glass blob that matches the exterior caused by the removal of heat from the furnace. The glassworker can then quickly inflate the molten glass to a coherent blob and work it into a desired shape .The Toledo Museum of Art attempted to reconstruct the ancient free-blowing technique by using clay blowpipes. The result proved that short clay blowpipes of about 30-60 cm facilitate free-blowing because they are simple to handle, easy to manipulate and can be re-used several times . Skilled workers are capable of shaping almost any vessel forms by rotating the pipe, swinging it and controlling the temperature of the piece while they blow. A great variety of glass objects, ranging from drinking cups to window glass, are produced by free-blowing.

Read more at Wikipedia.org