Some religious
buildings with colored glass, built in ancient times, have survived to this
day. Such are the Kyiv Sophia Cathedral, the cathedrals of Constantinople,
Rome, and Milan, the mosques of Iran, the temples of India.
Artists created
whole pictures. These were colorful meadows, mountain and forest landscapes,
scenes from religious legends. The sun rays passed through these glass colored
images as if animating them. It seemed that the window was glowing from within
with some kind of magical light.
But for all its
beauty, stained-glass windows were not suitable for ordinary housing: a person
wanted to see the world from the window for what it is. For such windows, a
flat, completely colorless and transparent sheet of glass was needed. And they
just didn’t know how to do this...
At the beginning
of the XIV century, the French glass master Cockerei proposed a new method of
manufacturing a glass sheet. He blew out the bubble, leveled its bottom on the
floor and attached an iron rod to the middle of the already flat bottom. Then
he cut off the bubble from the glass-blowing tube and carefully pushed apart
the still warm and flexible edges of the hole. He got an open glass bowl.
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Cockerei Method |
The "bull
eye" was selling cheaper than other parts of the glass sheet, but it was
also expensive. And flat parts were estimating especially highly and were not
widely available to anyone...
But soon glass
factories appeared in Italy and France, in Holland and England, in Russia and Germany. The glass fell in price, became available to many, although the work of the master
glassblower who made the window glass was still very difficult.