THE use of glass during the industrial and scientific revolutions was what separated western civilisation from the rest of the world in the 17th and 18th centuries. Progress in everything from astronomy to medicine to modern genetics would have been impossible without it, an anthropologist is claiming.
Without glass, there would have been no microscopes or telescopes. Louis Pasteur would not have identified infectious diseases and launched a medical revolution. Biologists could not have observed cell division, understood chromosomes, or unravelled DNA’s structure, leaving us bereft of modern genetics. Much of Galileo’s work on the solar system would have been…
