Glassy Ambers and Greens—How They Came Into Being

Glass; it’s meant to be clear and transparent.

But then what about those soda bottles or those cobalt blue tincture jars?

If glass is meant to be clear (and make no mistake, in most of the cases, it is), how are colored glass jars and bottles the opposite?

Glass was originally meant to be clear and transparent, and in its earliest years, it was.

Clear as a glass!

And then one day by accident (and experimentation), someone produced a colored glass. No one exactly knows who did it, but it’s widely believed that it were Egyptians or Mesopotamians (there’s a dispute as to who did it first) living in the early 3500 BCE.

Soon the art became popular and colored glass was found to be everywhere.

But the colored glass that was produced at that time was hardly produced in any controlled manner and the choices of colors were quite limited.

Then in eighth century, a Persian Chemist by the name of Abu Musa Jabir ibn Hayyan finally cracked the ultimate formula of producing colored glass. He observed that adding oxidized metal to glass (when it’s still in molten form) produces colored glass. His observations became studies; studies became practice and practice became skill.

And from those early years, those skills were passed on from one generation to another, from one civilization to another and finally to the glass manufacturing plants that run today.

So colored glass that is produced today, is made from the same formula devised by Abu Musa Jabir ibn Hayyan, that is, by adding metal to the molten mixture of silica and cullet (waste glass).

Adding cobalt oxide to the mixture produces a blue colored glass

Adding sulfur to the mixture produces an amber colored glass

Adding chromium oxide to the mixture produces green colored glass

Adding uranium oxide to the mixture produces yellow colored glass

And that is how glassy ambers, blues and greens come into being.

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