From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, every laboratory was filled with glassware, and every trainee scientist learned to work with glass. Not any more. The age of glassware is passing, progressively displaced by the black boxes, new materials, and digital displays of twenty-first century laboratory instrumentation. To anyone under the age of fifty, the contents of this chapter are in danger of appearing like a tale from a strange land. We have already lost much knowledge about glass. All the more reason to write this brief history of glassware in modern science.
