Glass In Everyday Life

1. Introduction

This report will cover the varieties of glass and their use based on the suitability of the glass properties to its applications. Glass is one of the most common materials in modern society and its application ranges from everyday life to art and architecture. As technology advances, the use of glass has also evolved and impacted healthcare extensively.

1.1. Properties

Glass is a type of matter with an amorphous (non-crystalline) property, displaying a glass transition at its melting point. It is obtained by melting sand and other minerals together at extreme temperatures. In its basic structure, glass is made from pure silica that can most commonly be found in sand. However because pure silica has very high melting temperatures

2.1. Use of Glass in Everyday Life

2.1.1. Glass Mirrors

One of the most common uses of glass in our everyday lives is in the glass mirrors that we have at home. In the early years, mirrors were largely made of polished metal such as copper and bronze. As can be guessed, these were not the best materials from which mirrors were made and it was not until the thirteenth century that good-quality glass mirrors became common.
2.1.2. Eyeglasses

Another common use of glass today is in the lenses of our eye-glasses, which has allowed those with less than perfect eyesight to still see clearly. After the polishing technique utilized in mirror glass became commonplace, the making of spherical glass surfaces also became easier, and the result is the eyeglasses that we use today (Rasmussen, 2012).
Modern eyeglasses only became ubiquitous in the nineteenth century and the first spectacles in the thirteenth century made use of convex lenses in order to improve the vision for the farsighted and were used mainly for reading (Rasmussen, 2012). For the nearsighted, concave lenses did not arrive until the mid-fifteenth century, largely because they were harder to manufacture (Rasmussen,

These characteristics are utilised in the use of glass in architecture as transparent glazing material. Majority of glass manufactured today, approximately 90%, is made of soda-lime-silica (Mukherjee, 2013). This is seen in the glass window, which in the 14th century was made of crown glass – a type of blown glass. The blowing & casting method of sheet glass production persisted until 1848 where Henry Bessemer first patented the float glass method (Hope, 1976). This method produced a very flat and standard uniformly thick glass – most modern windows are made this