History of glass
Glass remained a luxury material, and the disasters that overtook Late Bronze Age civilizations seem to have brought glass-making to a halt. It picked up again in its former sites, Syria and Cyprus, in the 9th century BC, when the techniques for making colorless glass were discovered. The first glassmaking "manual" dates back to ca. 650 BC. Instructions on how to make glass are contained in cuneiform tablets discovered in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. In Egypt glass-making did not revive until it was reintroduced in Ptolemaic Alexandria. Core-formed vessels and beads were still widely produced, but other techniques came to the fore with experimentation and technological advancements. During the Hellenistic period many new techniques of glass production were introduced and glass began to be used to make larger pieces, notably table wares. Techniques developed during this period include 'slumping' viscous (but not fully molten) glass over a mould in order to form a dish and 'millefiori' (meaning 'thousand flowers') technique, where canes of multicolored glass were sliced and the slices arranged together and fused in a mould to create a mosaic-like effect. It was also during this period that colorless or decolored glass began to be prized and methods for achieving this effect were investigated more fully.
Laminated glass
Laminated glass was invented in 1903 by the French chemist Édouard Bénédictus (1878-1930), inspired by a laboratory accident. A glass flask had become coated with the plastic cellulose nitrate and when dropped shattered but did not break into pieces. However, it was not until 1909 that Benedictus filed a patent, after hearing about a car accident where two women were severely injured by glass debris
. In 1911, he formed the "Société du Verre Triplex", which fabricated a glass-plastic composite to reduce injuries in car accidents.. Production of Triplex glass was slow and painstaking, making it expensive. It was not immediately widely adopted by automobile manufacturers, but laminated glass was widely used in the eyepieces of gas masks during World War I. In 1912, the process was licensed to "The English Triplex Safety Glass Company". Subsequently, in the United States, both Libbey Owens-Ford and Du Pont de Nemours with Pittsburg Plate Glass produced Triplex.