3000 BC: There are a lot of stories about how the secret of glass making was discovered. Therefore it is difficult to fine evidence as to who first managed to create enough heat to be able to melt silica sand, soda, and limestone to produce the first usable Glass.

The most popular version is the story told by the Roman historian, Pliny the elder: Phoenician merchants, trading in Natron, a soda-based enabling materials, built a campfire in the beach, using soda as a windbreak. The next morning the merchants found the inside of the soda block had fused with the beach sand to give a primitive from of Glass.

Carefully dated archaeological findings show enough evidence to locate the event to Mesopotamia sometime during the third millennium BC, when Amorite masters of iron and Sumerian potters, combined their knowledge and manufactured what is though to be the first useable Glass.

From the living home of glass, National Glass Centre.