Showing posts with label Sand and potash. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sand and potash. Show all posts

Friday, January 6, 2012

Beach Musing

It’s 25 degrees outside, and 53 inside (the big old boiler in the basement conked out about 1 a.m.) and I’m waiting for the repairman.  It’s hard to type with gloves on, and my fingers freeze up and fumble on the keys when I take them off, so I’m going to turn this frosty Friday blog post over to the professionals.  Travel writer and big thinker Bill Bryson gives us food for thought this morning: 

“Among the many thousands of things that I have never been able to understand, one in particular stands out. That is the question of who was the first person who stood by a pile of sand and said, ‘You know, I bet if we took some of this and mixed it with a little potash and heated it, we could make a material that would be solid and yet transparent. We could call it glass.’ Call me obtuse, but you could stand me on a beach till the end of time and never would it occur to me to try to make it into windows.”