Hand crafted Murano glass vase. Glass blown by specialized glasssmith Did you ever stop to wonder about how versatile a material glass is? Any kid who has ever broken a window or a glass bowl knows how fragile it can be. You can't just take a glass window and bend it, because it will break. How do we get all those glass items that come in so many different shapes and sizes then?
Glass is a unique, versatile material that can be shaped in many different ways to make a wide variety of products. Those finished products are obviously quite solid, even if they're fragile. Many of them, though, start out as a substance that looks more like a liquid!
Many of the most unique glass objects you'll see are the end result of an artistic process known as glassblowing. The art of glassblowing has been around a long, long time. How long? Historians can trace the art of glassblowing all the way back to the Roman Empire. In fact, it's the first century B.C. Syrians who are usually given credit for discovering that glass could be blown from the open end of a hollow tube and turned into all sorts of different shapes.