first known dichroic glass

[gypsea]

do you know how old dichroic glass is? i didn't til i found this article today...check this out...



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycurgus_cup

[themoch]

cool find

[Swampy]

Wow but they had some good skills didn´t they.

[Lmwfy]

The dichroic effect is achieved by making the glass with tiny proportions of minutely ground gold and silver dust.

not really 'dichroic' as we know it, but still a very cool find

[Icarus]

It isn't? The color from light passing through it is different from the light reflecting off of it. I thought that was pretty spot on to the definition of dichroic. Are you saying that because it doesn't sparkle?

[Matt P]

^^^^
exactly.

I read every word of that article, very cool find! I feel like I learned some awesome glass techniques/info from 300 AD, and I know if I'm in London, I'll have to go check this piece out!

Again, great find!

[r_ains]

Cool find, I would argue that it is closer to fumed work of today versus what we think of as dichroic. This states that the gold and silver is mixed into the glass formula and therefor the intense heat of the melted glass would create a fumed effect versus the process of dichro being multiple layers of metals on the surface of a "cold" sheet or object. This clearly influenced later workers to explore and come up with many of the great products we get to play with today. Good read.

[daveabr]

Dichroic as we know it, is vastly more complicated. But this is very cool. Imagine the fumes those dudes dealt with. Seriously, I wouldn't want to be in that room!

Here's a tidbit from the CBS site, referring to the process of dichroic as we know it now.

The coating process is completed in a vacuum
deposition chamber by vaporizing quartz and metal oxides with an
electron beam gun and condensing micro thin layers on the surface
of the glass in the form of a crystal structure. This coating that we
commonly call Dichroic glass today, is actually an “interference
filter” permanently adhered to the surface of a piece of glass. The
technology used to manufacture the optical interference filter has
been in existence for many years. It is known as “vacuum thin
film deposition.” The roots of this technology date back to the
late 1880’s. The possibility of depositing thin metal films in a
vacuum was discovered in 1887 by Nahrwold and a year later
adapted by Kundt for the purpose of measuring refractive
indices of metal films. The significant commercial
development of thin film deposition however, waited to be
spurred by our military and aerospace requirements in the
1950’s and 1960’s. In the last 30 years this technology has
played a key role in optical coating for a vast variety of
optical instruments, lasers and laser systems, fiber
communication links, optical recording/storage heads and
media, display systems, infrared guidance and detection devices, photoelectric
converters, architectural glass, eyeglasses, and many others. The first interference filters
used for art were Helium Neon Laser and Hot/Cold Mirrors. The noticeable brightness of
light energy from the colorful coatings offered no absorption, unlike normal “Stained
Glass” that derives its color by
transmitting one band of light and
absorbing the remaining part of light.

[funksizzle]

The guy who ran the shine process adding the glass in the golden brass coridoor which also served as a womens drying room by the bath fountain was my great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandmother's mistress. The story goes that most children in Rome are of direct heritage to this man, and many settlers, and bastardized children immigrated to America and Italy late in the 1200's. Some of the broker ones like my great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandmother had to polish casted brass poles to make it to america by the 1500's. Luckily the eyes, and touch of the dichro shine are passed on through the male semen to babies via dna. My bodily fluids aren't for sale, don't pm me about it.

Cool to know Dave, that's pretty interesting. To even make a machine that could do that in 1887 is pretty amazing. Luckily you don't have to go to college to use dichro these days, and they have these wonderful flame pods that put fire out through what is called a torch so you don't have to squat down by some hot furnace and blow through some guy's pipe for five years to get a piece of the action. (No offense to the furnace behotches out there currently on there knees, gettin knocked in the teeth by some gaffer named bruce after blowing his rod)

[daveabr]

priceless

[T-Rex]

cool article, thanks for sharing!