A modest watchmaker lived in Switzerland, and his name
was Pierre-Louis Ginan. Looking at his puny figure and expressionless eyes, it
was hard to think that he was capable of doing anything significant. Meanwhile,
it was this man who turned out to be the ancestor of optical glass.
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| At the Factory of Optical Glass |
And for the manufacture of lenses, glass is to be so
clean and transparent that it is difficult to even pick up anything in nature
for comparison. If we talk about the water of a spring - and that will be
inaccurate.
Only rock crystal has the purest transparency that is
achieved in the manufacture of optical glass. After all, lenses inserted into a
telescope or microscope help a person to look into a world that is not visible
with a simple eye.
For several centuries, glassmakers sought to obtain a
glass in which there would be no spots, no stripes, or bubbles. Chemists made a
variety of recipes for glass melting.
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| Optical Glass |
They added lead oxide and received clear, clear
crystal-glass; they replaced lead oxide with boric and phosphoric acid,
introduced zinc oxide, arsenic, antimony...
All this really gave the glass greater transparency.
But the bubbles...
But in 1811, new lenses appeared on sale. And what
surprised everyone was their size. New lenses were four times larger than
before. But this is not enough. They were transparent, they had no stripes, no
dots and there were almost no bubbles. It turned out that the secret to
creating these lenses was not discovered by a chemist, not a glass specialist,
but by some Swiss watchmaker named Pierre-Louis Ginan. And he did not want to
reveal his secret to anyone.
