GlazIers – The Trade of Glazing

The first recorded use of glazing in windows was by the Romans in the first century AD. This glass was rudimentary, essentially a blown cylinder that had been flattened out, and was not very transparent. In the eleventh century, techniques were developed where the glass was spun into a disc, creating a thinner circular window, or a cylinder was again formed, but this time it was cut from edge to edge and unrolled to make a rectangle-shaped window. The newer cylinder method remained the dominant method until the 19th century, and individual panes of glass were therefore limited in size to the dimensions of those cylinders.

Continuous plate production was invented in 1848 by Henry Bessemer, who drew a ribbon of glass through rollers. This standardized the thickness of the glass, but its use in mass production was limited by the need to polish both sides of the glass after manufacture, which was time-consuming and expensive. The process was slowly refined throughout the next century, with automated grinders and polishers being added to bring the cost down.

The breakthrough in large, mass-produced, continuous glass production happened in the 1950s with the development of the Float glass manufacturing process. Molten glass is poured over a surface of molten tin, where it flattens out and can be drawn off in a ribbon. The advantage of this process is that it is scalable to any size and produces high-quality panes without any further polishing or grinding. Float glass has continued to be the most used type of glazing to the present day.

Today’s glazier can be found at your local glass shops just like Augusta Glass where they fit and fabricate glass to be installed for projects of many magnitudes