The United States may be celebrating its 250th anniversary, but one notable building product has an even longer story to tell.
Glass windows trace their origins back nearly 2,000 years to the eastern Mediterranean. In the U.S., glass windows were first used as early as the 1600s, thanks in part to European settlers. Up until the mid-1700s, the use of glass in windows was a luxury, with wealthy settlers installing lites of blown glass held together with lead cames. Most settlers, though, had to rely on oiled paper, shutters or animal hides to cover windows.
A major milestone in the U.S. glass industry came in 1739, when Caspar Wistar founded Wistar Glass Works in New Jersey, the first successful commercial glass factory in the American colonies. Arguably, the defining moment in modern architectural glass came in 1959, when Sir Alastair Pilkington unveiled the float glass process, which soon became the global standard for manufacturing flat glass.
To mark America’s 250th anniversary, we look back at 250 years of architectural glass and the milestones that shaped the nation’s glass industry.
