Glassblowing
A hollow iron pipe turns glass from a luxury into everyday tableware.
- When
- Known to
- ± 20 years
- Era
- Classical, Holocene
Glassblowing is invented on the Syro-Palestinian coast around 50 BCE: gathering molten glass on the end of a tube and inflating it is enormously faster than core-forming or casting, and it makes thin-walled vessels possible. Prices collapse, and glass becomes ordinary across the Roman world — windows, bottles, cups. It is one of the clearest cases in antiquity of a process innovation changing who can own something.