Thom,Glassblowing History
All you need to do to create glass is some sand, lime, soda, and a lot of heat. According to an old legend, you can trace glassblowing back to the Roman times. It was told, that people used to cook their dinner on the beach on pots on top of stones of natron, which is a soda used for embalming. As the fire got very hot on the natron stones, it caused the stones and sand to melt forming a mysterious liquid, which is the original source of manmade glass.
Another account of the history of glass making happened during the 1st century in Mesopotamia where potters got sand and other minerals to blend together while trying to put their clay into manmade pots. Then, around a thousand years later, a very smart Mesopotamian made a glass tube and began to use this tube to blow a bubble, creating the very first blowpipe. It had then been told that this is the time that glassblowing became an "art" form, and not just a trade. Glassblowing had somewhat of a decline after the fall of the Roman Empire, but it later made a good comeback. During the Italian Renaissance for example, areas like Venice became glass blowing havens.
Glassblowing was brought to the New World during the first colonists of Jamestown, which has many people know to be glassblowers. Glassblowing has a very long and interesting history of very skilled people who are always exposed to extreme heat. Glassblowers to this day use simple tools and their breath, to make beautiful vases, glasses, cups, and any type of artwork their imagination dream up. The glassblowers worked very hard to perfect their skills, and begin to really start creating individual works of art that very much match the personality of the artist.
Anybody in the past who was interested in creating glasswork had to go to factories that made very basic objects, not really consider art. But in 1962, a very smart man called Harvey Littleton changed this by figuring out that glass could be melted with lower temperatures in smaller studio furnaces. This basically made the number of glass blowing studios increase significantly, since factories where no longer required for an artist to express his work. Now, anybody with the proper training can stand in front on a hot furnace, or hold a blow torch, or a blowpipe with vision of what they want their melted liquid to become. All you need to become a glassblower is the desire, the will, and a creative mind for creating art.