[Image above] About 120 people gathered in New York City for a debriefing of the International Year of Glass at the United Nations Headquarters in December 2022. Credit: ACerS
In a year-end message to the glass community, Alicia Durán, chair of the United Nations International Year of Glass, said, “We arrive to the end of 2022, the magic year in which our dream came true.”
The dream for IYOG began in 2018 with L. David Pye, Dean Emeritus of the College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Inspired by the UN’s 2015 International Year of Light, Pye realized it was a short leap from celebrating light to celebrating glass and its inextricable relationship with light.
Despite challenges imposed by the pandemic, the UN unanimously approved the resolution declaring 2022 as the International Year of Glass on May 18, 2021. The IYOG proposal enjoyed the endorsement of 1,123 organizations from 74 countries spanning seven continents. With that declaration, a global flurry of planning began for a year of conferences, publications, demonstrations, art shows, special courses, and much more—all centered on glass.
The IYOG Closing Ceremony took place Dec. 8–9, 2022, at the University of Tokyo, Japan. The event comprised a two-day conference with speakers representing the glass science, engineering, manufacturing, and arts community. A highlight of the ceremony was the unveiling of the “Seven Glass Wonders of the World.” Without a doubt, the international committee of jurors had some very difficult decisions to make! The Wonders are listed at the end of this article.
The final IYOG event was a debriefing at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City. About 120 people attended from as far away as Japan, Spain, Czechia, Europe, and Brazil. Augustín Santos Maraver, Spain’s ambassador to the UN, welcomed the delegation and provided some history of how this auspicious year came to be.
IYOG chair Alicia Durán made an interesting choice with the selection of Fernando Valladares as the plenary speaker because Valladares is not a glassman but instead a leading researcher on climate change and sustainability at CSIC and Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Spain.
“Science is proposing good questions that solve a good part of the problem,” Valladares said in his plenary talk. Focusing on the essential role of glass in sustainability, he noted that “Humanity would not be what it is today without glass,” citing examples from architecture, biology, medicine, and more.
Katy Devlin, editor of Glass Magazine, published by the National Glass Association, led a two-part panel discussion on the themes of ‘sustainability and climate change’ and ‘health issues and social well-being.’ Both these themes are among the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.
Panelists Himanshu Jain (Lehigh University), Bertrand Cazes (Glass for Europe, Belgium), and Erik Muijsenberg (Glass Service, a.s., Czechia) talked about use of glass in renewable energy, new hybrid-fuel furnace designs, and ways glass is serving new functions in buildings. Jain also pointed to some new applications far from the usual application portfolio, such as slow-release fertilizers in glass beads to reduce over fertilization and run-off that leads to algae blooms in the waterways.
Urmilla Jokhu-Sowell (National Glass Association), Teresa Medici (Regional Government of Lombardy, Italy), and Julian Jones (Imperial College, London) focused on ways people interact with glass and the impact is has on them without even realizing it.
For example, research shows that students learn better and faster in daylight environments, while retailers experience more sales when shoppers are exposed to daylight. Plus, medical research shows that daylight reduces the need for pain medication and can shorten the length of hospital stays. That is a lot of benefit from a window!
Additionally, via a prerecorded message, Jones highlighted the remarkable contributions of glass to medicine, including discoveries by Delbert Day and the late Larry Hench.
One hallmark of IYOG was its reach beyond the science, engineering, and manufacturing to the arts and cultural institutions. Medici noted that museums serve a strategic educational role as “places of learning through objects” and reside at the “intersection of art, science, and technology.”
As the art and science community became more intimately involved with each other over the course of IYOG, they discovered a shared fascination with glass and found that both communities have much to learn from each other.
Artists, after all, are experimentalists too, and they have sharply honed intuitions about glass as a medium. Artists conceptualize their hypotheses in sketchbooks, whereas scientists and engineers conceptualize theirs in lab notebooks. Both groups test and refine ideas in studios or labs. While the end results may differ—a unique piece of art versus a new product that is made in the quantities of millions of units—we benefit from understanding more about glass. New collaborations between the “left” and “right” glass brain communities have already started to blossom.
What comes next? Reports from IYOG will be finalized and deposited in the UN archive, and Durán says the IYOG organizational body will apply to serve as a consultant to the UN. Many new connections and friendships commenced this year, and they will carry the momentum of the International Year into the future.
There certainly remains plenty of work to be done, and this year showed definitively that glass will be important to solving the world’s pressing grand challenges. Durán summarized this moment well, saying, “Good-bye IYOG. Welcome to the Age of Glass!”
View ACerS photo albums from the UN debriefing, as well as the earlier National Day of Glass and ACerS Glass & Optical Materials Division Annual Meeting, on the ACerS Flickr page. And read more about what took place during IYOG on the ACerS website!
Seven Wonders of Glass
1–Glass from the Tomb of Tutankhamun (Currently at the Egyptian Museum, Cairo. Starting in 2023, also at the Grand Egyptian Museum, Gizeh, Egypt.)
The Middle East is the place of origin for glass making. More than 3,500 years ago, practitioners in modern Turkey, Iraq, Egypt, and other places succeeded in producing outstanding colorful glass objects and vessels. Only in Egypt, however, in the tombs of the Pharaohs, did these items survive without any wear. Some look as bright as if they were made yesterday.
The impressive preservation of items is particularly true for the finds from the tomb of Tutankhamun, which was discovered in 1922, more than 3,300 years after his death. The treasure of glass artefacts from the tomb is exceptionally exquisite, ranging from thousands of elaborate glass inlays that not only adorn more than 150 pieces of jewelry but also the king’s throne, weapons, and even chariots. Even full-scale headrests are made entirely of glass! The blue stripes on the mummy’s mask also consist of glass—some of them are more than 50 cm long—and demonstrate the superb level of glass technology already at this early stage of its history.
2–Lycurgus Cup (The British Museum, London)
This cup displays a miraculous color effect. Under normal lighting, the glass appears jade green, but when lit from behind, it turns ruby red. Scientists who studied this phenomenon found it is due to gold and silver nanoparticles in the glass. While ancient Romans certainly had no concept of nanotechnology, they used its effects in ways that could not be replicated for millennia.
As amazing as its color effects, so too is its relief cutting. The figures of King Lycurgus, the God Dionysus, and others have been carved from the thick-walled blank in a three-dimensional way. The cup is one of the few and most luxurious glass vessels of Roman times, the cage-cups, where the glass blank was painstakingly cut and ground to leave the motif as a “cage” suspended from the surface. Among these, the Lycurgus cup is the only well-preserved example with figures.
3–Sainte-Chapelle (Paris, France)
Stained-glass windows in medieval churches collect the outside light and turn it into shapes that glow in the most striking colors inside the church. Windows are often prominent in Gothic cathedrals, but in no other medieval building are the windows as dominant as in the Sainte-Chapelle.
Sainte-Chapelle was commissioned by King Louis IX of France as the royal chapel and built in record time from 1242 to its consecration on April 26, 1248. Together with the rose window, 15 stained-glass windows cover a surface area greater than 700 m². More than one thousand biblical scenes tell the story of the world from its beginning to the arrival of the relics of the Passion of Christ in Paris. While a lot of the glass had to be repaired over time, nearly two-thirds are still the original glass panes dating back nearly 800 years, truly forming walls of light.
4–The Ware Collection of Blaschka glass models of plants (Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.)
The Blaschkas brought the art of flame-working glass to an extreme and demonstrated there is nothing in the natural world that could not be perfectly imitated in glass. This exceptional collection, better known as the “Blaschka Glass Flowers,” was commissioned by George Lincoln Goodale, the first director of the Botanical Museum at Harvard.
Leopold (1822–1895) and Rudolf Blaschka (1857–1939) were a father and son team of Bohemian glass artists active in Dresden, Germany. Over the course of 50 years, from 1886 to 1936, the Blaschkas produced 4,300 glass models that represent 780 plant species in their finest detail. The Blaschkas were already renowned for their invertebrate glass models, known to educational institutions and museums around the world before they commenced on their epic and intricately detailed glass models of plants.
5–The Corning Museum of Glass (Corning, N.Y.)
Despite its distance to large cities, the Museum welcomes more than a quarter of a million visitors from all over the world each year. It is an independent nonprofit institution that preserves and expands the world’s understanding of glass, with an educational and aspirational mission: to inspire people to see glass in a new light.
This outstanding institution was originally conceived by Arthur A. Houghton, Jr. (1906–1990), whose family owned Corning Glass Works, now Corning Incorporated. The Museum opened its doors in the small town in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York in 1951.
Included in the Museum is the largest glass collection in the world, combined with a library that seeks to build a comprehensive collection of books, archival, and rare materials about glass, and a studio where artists teach their art of glassmaking.
6–Optical fibers
A glass rod, when heated, can be pulled into an eA glass rod, when heated, can be pulled into an ever thinner and seemingly endless glass thread. It was known since the 19th century that these fibers could transport light, but it took until the 1960s for researchers such as Charles K. Kao to set the stage for a technological revolution.
Since the 1970s, glass fibers about as thick as a human hair are being used to transport huge quantities of information; they function, in simple terms, as light bouncing in a tube. The network of optical fiber is ever expanding throughout the world. This extensive and invisible network of cables stretches over 1.2 million kilometers globally, delivering emails, news, your favorite films, and cute videos of cats almost instantaneously.
7–Hubble Space Telescope
The Hubble Space Telescope is the first dedicated observatory launched and deployed into orbit by the space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990. Two mirrors, made of ultralow expansion glass (kept at 21°C to avoid warping), offer Hubble its optical capabilities. A primary glass mirror of 2.4 m diameter and weighing approximately 800 kg reflects its light on the 0.3 m secondary mirror.
Hubble has revealed crystal clear views of our universe—from distant stars and galaxies never seen before, to detailed observations of the planets in our solar system. Many Hubble observations have led to breakthroughs in astrophysics, such as determining the rate of expansion of the universe. The Hubble Space Telescope is an international collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency and has made more than 1.5 million observations during its 30 years of service.