18 January, 2018 - 01:50 dhwty
An Unbreakable Story: The Lost Roman Invention of Flexible Glass
Imagine a glass you can bend and then watch it return to its original form. A glass that you drop but it doesn’t break. Stories say that an ancient Roman glassmaker had the technology to create a flexible glass, ‘vitrium flexile’, but a certain emperor decided the invention should not be.
Flexible glass is allegedly a type of unbreakable glass that was invented during the Roman period. Man-made glass (as opposed to a naturally occurring one such as obsidian) is widely accepted to have been invented by the Phoenicians. Over the course of the millennia, glass-makers honed their skills, improving the techniques used to produce this substance, as well as the glass itself. In the Roman Empire, glass became a commonly produced item, though special luxury glasses were also created. Arguably one of the most intriguing of these glass types is the so-called flexible glass.
http://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-ancient-technology/unbreakable-story-lost-roman-invention-flexible-glass-009453