Standard glass is an important part of the general visual and character of historic buildings, but is often reviled for its perceived imperfections. Luckily, conventional glass is being protected and safeguarded increasingly more; allowing it to be used for several years to come.
So how do you understand if you have historic glass in your residential or commercial property? Newham Glass take a look at the top 5 different varieties of traditional glass and how you can recognise it in your own home.
1. Cylinder Glass
Cylinder glass was built by blowing a cylinder of molten glass, which was then cut at the ends and along the side before being flattened out in a furnace. It is also referred to as “broad”, “sheet” or “muff” glass and was popular up until the mid 1700s.
Cylinder glass can be identified by its slightly rippled surface area (which the ripples usually running in the very same instructions). This is usually accompanied by a pattern of long air bubbles that lie in straight, parallel lines.
2. Crown Glass
Crown glass is made by blowing and after that spinning molten glass into a large thin disc referred to as a table. This big thing disc would then be cut into smaller panes. Crown glass is often a little curved with distinctive semi-circular lines known as the ream. It is thinner, brighter and shinier than cylinder glass. It tends to have a visible pattern of concentric circles, and may have a little thick circle of glass or “bullseye” from the centre of the table.
3. Plate Glass
To make early plate glass, thick cylinder glass or cast glass was ground down to make it flat and after that the surface polished up until smooth. Plate glass was very costly as an outcome of this labour-intensive process. So it was utilized, from the late 1600s onwards, generally for mirrors and to glaze high status structures.
4. Patent plate glass
James Chance developed the process for making ‘patent plate’ glass in 1839. This process made it possible to grind and polish thinner sheets of glass than the traditional plate glass strategy enabled. Manufacturers could then make more completed glass from the exact same amount of basic materials.
5. Drawn flat sheet
Glass production ended up being more mechanised from the early 1900s. Numerous methods were invented to allow a constant sheet of glass to be drawn out of a heater of molten glass. Each sheet was gone through a series of rollers and cooled, and after that mechanically ground and polished.
