ROMANCE OF GLASS

Hawera Star, Volume XLVI, 11 September 1926, Page 11

ROMANCE OF GLASS

THE GENIUS OF GALILEO

There is every reason to believe that ( ihe account given by the elder Pliny of i the origin of glass is historically cor-i feet. Phoenician traders vamping at the foot of Mount Carmel kindled a tire in an oven made of blocks of "natron," or native soda, to cook their dinner. The heat of the fire fused the sand and soda together, and produced the first glass. Its permanence was assured by an admixture of "magnes lapsis," a magnesian limestone found in that region. Unlike the Chinese, the Eomans had no clay suitable for the making of porcelain. Hence the abundance and variety of Roman glass found within the borders of the old Empire, from Cologne, to the Manchester Ship Canal. Some of the Roman emperors used magnifying glasses, and so did Roger Bacon, that Doctor Mirabilis, who was once imprisoned for practising "magic," and who certainly maintained that "the sun, moon, and stars may be made to descend hither in appearance." This was long before the three centuries of Venetian supremacy in glass-making. But 1 when, in .1699, Galileo visited Venice, he heard that a "Belgian" had eclipsed all Venetian achievement's by constructing a cylinder containing glasses which made Roger Bacon’s dream a reality. The States-General had, in fact, voted a sum of 200 florinh to Bippershey for his "perspective instrument,” though they refused him the desired monopoly. To the genius of Galileo the bare hint sufficed. He returned to Padua, solved the problem overnight, and made his first telescope the next day. It magnified distant objects three times. Further magnifications of eight diameters, and even thirty-three diameters wore obtained before the year was out, and then came that amazing succession „of discoveries which shook the foundation of Aristotelian philosophy, and seemed to threaten the very citadel of accepted belief. The sun itself was no longer spotless, the moon was covered with mountains, casting gaunt shadows over the arid plains. Venus had phases like another and smaller moon.

As for Jupiter, its i'ouT attendant I moons’ appeared as si sort of visible i jnodel of the Gopcrnieian world,system, ■ a hypothesis which aroused Galileo’s (passionate enthusiasm, although in his told age ho was forced,to renounce it. The discoverer of the terrestrial telescope concealed his Latin formula in an illegible cryptogram. His modern sue- 1 cessor is bolder and wiser. He stands' before his peers at an assembly like the optical convention and lays all his diagrams/on the table. The best, optical glass comes from Birmingham rather than ,Tcna. A leis-, urely scholar in Cambridge digs among his Greek roots and evolves the word ‘‘periscope.” He wakes up on the day, and iinds that his word has become the terror, of the seas. It emerges from the vhsty deep and spits torpedoes. A naval battle is a matter of steel and glass. The 100 ft. range-finders of Glasgow are better than many guns. And Odysseus knew that eye ll in land Warfare the most effective’ salvation lies in putting out the eye of Polyphemus. The eye which first saw the germ of cancer was largely a thing of glass, and brass mounted in a British socket. For steadiness is a prime requisite of the finest microscopic work. ISTo sweetmeat factory can dispense with its polarimeter, which does for the chocolates what the sextant does for navigation.