Broad sheet is a type of hand-blown glass. It is made by blowing molten glass into an elongated balloon shape with a blowpipe. Then, while the glass is still hot, the ends are cut off and the resulting cylinder is split with shears and flattened on an iron plate. (This is the forerunner of the cylinder process). The quality of broad sheet glass is not good, with many imperfections. Due to the relatively small sizes blown, broad sheet was typically made into leadlights.
Other methods for making hand-blown glass included blown plate glass, crown glass, polished plate glass and cylinder blown sheet glass. These methods of manufacture lasted at least until the end of the 19th Century. The early 20th century marks the move away from hand-blown to machine manufactured glass such as rolled plate glass, machine drawn cylinder sheet glass, flat drawn sheet glass, single and twin ground polished plate glass and float glass.
According to the website of the London Crown Glass Company, broad sheet glass was first made in the UK in Sussex in 1226 CE. This glass was of poor quality and fairly opaque. Manufacture slowly decreased and ceased by the early 16th Century. French glassmakers and others were making broad sheet glass earlier than this.
Famous quotes containing the words broad, sheet and/or glass:
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.... I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Some days your hat’s off to the full-time mothers for being able to endure the relentless routine and incessant policing seven days a week instead of two. But on other days, merely the image of this woman crafting a brontosaurus out of sugar paste and sheet cake for her two-year-old’s birthday drives a stake through your heart.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“People who, out of an inborn moderation, leave every glass standing only half-emptied refuse to admit that everything in the world has its sediments and dregs.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)