Robert H. Brill - The 1960s

The 1960s

The 1960s saw Brill beginning to develop the analytical techniques that would define the early years of his career at Corning, and yet the scope of his interest within glass remained vast. Indeed, 1961 saw Brill pen a letter to Nature with a colleague, that was a ‘bombshell’, according to Newton, in the field of glass-dating (1971, 3). Here Brill suggested that the rather enigmatic weathering crust found to form on buried glass objects over time could be used to date the object in a method rather similar to dendrochronology, using the separate layers of the shiny lamination (Brill 1961, Brill and Hood 1961, Newton 1971). Whilst in dendrochronology the tree-rings account simply for the tree’s annual growth, in the weathering crust on glass Brill suggested the accumulation of a layer of laminate might respond to some kind of annual event of climatic change (Brill 1961). Unfortunately, despite the examples of the method’s successful applications provided by Brill, such as the almost accurate count of 156 layers on a bottle-base from the York River submerged in 1781 and excavated in 1935, the technique largely failed to convince and did not see widespread adoption (Brill 1961, Newton 1971).