10 August: Glass

Today is the feast day of St Lawrence, patron of glaziers. Here, then are 10 things you might not know about glass:

1. Glass is made by mixing sand with lime and soda ash and heating it to a very high temperature. When the mixture cools, you get glass.
2. To get coloured glass, simply add an extra ingredient: Iron oxide makes Green glass; cobalt oxide makes Blue glass; nickel oxide makes violet glass; Copper oxide makes turquoise, manganese dioxide makes Purple and cadmium sulfide makes Red. To get Orange or yellow, Silver nitrate is added. Someone once told me that this means if you see a stained glass window with a lot of Yellow in it, the person or church who commissioned it would have to have been rich.
3. When glass breaks the cracks move at 3,000 miles an hour. That’s five times faster than a commercial jet plane.
4. Glass isn’t classified as a solid. There’s a common myth that says the glass in very old buildings will be thicker at the bottom because the glass flows downwards very slowly. It’s not a liquid, either. It’s classified as an amorphous solid as the molecules within it can still move around. They don’t, however, flow. If the Window of an old building is thicker at the bottom, it will be because they couldn’t produce perfect sheets of glass in olden times.
5. It takes a million years for glass to decompose. And over 300 glass bottles and jars are used by an average UK family every year. Luckily, though, it can be recycled over and over indefinitely without any loss of quality. Recycled glass is called cullet, and requires 40% less energy to produce than producing glass from raw materials.
6. One glass object which is not going to be recycled any time soon is the Portland vase, said to be one of the most valuable glass objects in the world. It was made in Rome between 5 and 25 AD. It currently resides in the British Museum.
7. Nature makes glass. Lightning striking a beach can turn the sand into glass. This usually takes the form of tubes called fulgurites. it also forms inside volcanoes. That particular kind of glass is called obsidian. It can also form when a Meteorite strikes. This is called impactite. Moldavite and Libyan desert glass are types of impactite.
8. The oldest known man-made glass is some beads made in Egypt around 12,000 BC. Before that, though, humans discovered that fractured obsidian had sharp edges which could be used to cut things.
9. The word “gob” meaning your mouth, as in “he’s got a big gob” or “shut your gob” has its origins in glass making. Gob is a word for a lump of molten glass. A glass blower uses a tube to blow the glass into the required shape, puffing his or her cheeks out, giving them, effectively, “a big gob”.
10. The writer Daphne du Maurier was descended from a family of glass-blowers in 18th century France. Her 1963 historical novel The Glass-Blowers is about her ancestors.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

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