Since some of you showed interest in my sea glass post, and a few of you even look for and collect bottles, I thought I'd show some of the rarest glass found in this country-- "black glass",
Since spirits and medicines frequently required protection from sunlight, early glass manufactures produced dark, nearly black, glass. During the 17th century the Dutch shipped black flasks of gin to the colonies. Although called black glass, when held up to the light it's actually a very dark olive green. This was created by adding iron slag to the glass batch to add resistance to breakage on long ocean voyages. Some times the glass was a dark amber, but both contained thousands of tiny bubbles or seeds from the glass blowing process.
In the 1920's cobalt and manganese were combined to create black amethyst tableware. Just prior to and during the Depression, truly opaque black glass was created in limited quantities in the US called Ferroline, used for tableware and fashionable buttons.
Finding blown black glass is considered quite old and rare. Finding this black glass might occur once for every 2500 pcs. of sea glass found on the beach. All of these pieces were found on the same stretch of beach on the lower Chesapeake Bay.
Since spirits and medicines frequently required protection from sunlight, early glass manufactures produced dark, nearly black, glass. During the 17th century the Dutch shipped black flasks of gin to the colonies. Although called black glass, when held up to the light it's actually a very dark olive green. This was created by adding iron slag to the glass batch to add resistance to breakage on long ocean voyages. Some times the glass was a dark amber, but both contained thousands of tiny bubbles or seeds from the glass blowing process.
In the 1920's cobalt and manganese were combined to create black amethyst tableware. Just prior to and during the Depression, truly opaque black glass was created in limited quantities in the US called Ferroline, used for tableware and fashionable buttons.
Finding blown black glass is considered quite old and rare. Finding this black glass might occur once for every 2500 pcs. of sea glass found on the beach. All of these pieces were found on the same stretch of beach on the lower Chesapeake Bay.
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