In 1934, while working in upstate New York at the labs at Corning, the glassmaking business, a young American chemist called James Franklin Hyde managed to make glass by synthesising it from chemicals, spraying silicon tetrachloride (a liquid formed by dissolving silica sand in chloride compounds) into the flame of a welder’s torch. The resulting glass was remarkable, not just for the way it was created—the first step-shift in glassmaking in thousands of years—but for its chemical composition. Hyde had manufactured a nearly immaculate form of silica glass, a glass as pure—indeed, purer—than
...more
