Glass is a very strange object. For example, furniture is made of wood. Paper is made of trees or fiber. A textile is made of cloth-usually cotton, wool, or silk. But glass, glass is made of sand. That makes no sense.

How can one object be made out of a completely foreign and dissimilar compound? One is grainy, dirty, dark, and sticks to your wet feet, and the other is smooth, clean, light, and water slides right off it. The answer is fire! Right. Fire. You got it.

Heat the sand up and it turns to glass. Make sure you add silica or it just won't work. It doesn't really become glass (like a beer bottle), but it does become a molten mess. This globular mess is usually blown by someone with a long pipe (a pontil) or placed into a mold and then cooled. The result is either case is a piece of glass.

Although for many, many years the only way to make glass was to blow it through a tube (like making soap bubbles), an early Victorian inventor created molds that made the job a lot easier and much more productive.

The fact that glass is made from sand and silica makes it relatively cheap. (Have you ever paid a lot of money for a bag of sand?) So how come glass can be so expensive?

The answer is not the glass itself, but what someone does with the glass. You can change formulas and add chemicals or elements to the basic formula (Tiffany's favrille glass), you can make elaborate patterns in molds (pattern glass), you can artistically design the surface by grinding it (cut or engraved glass), you can paint the surface (Victorian painted glass), you can add colors to the molten mess (Victorian Art Glass), or you can experiment in any number of combinations.

The key to antique glass is the rarity of the design, particularly if it is made from a mold, or the amount of handwork in the finished product. One that is pushed out of a mold and then sold is a lot less valuable than one that is made as a blank, cut on a copper wheel by a craftsman, then polished and gilt by a finisher. Ages has very little to do with it. (No nothing to do with it, just very little.)

People tend to collect pattern glass because it's easier to find and identify. One would rather have a collection of 20 pieces than just one. You also don't have to know a lot about the product - jus the patterns, shapes and colors, the information of which is available in many books.

One of a kind glass is a lot harder, both to identify and to value. But there are lots of references, museums, auctions, and collectors for help. Beware! Collecting glass can be habit forming. (Ever heard of a person having a collection of one piece of depression or carnival glass?).

Oh, by the way. Glass also breaks. It's made out of sand, heated by fire, and breaks. Who would have thought?

Article from Betcha Didn't Know That by Brian Kathenes & Leon Castner