Man-made crystal production
During the times of Ancient Rome, it was believed that crystal was water that had changed its properties.
Today, simple glass has replaced crystal. Large Russian enterprises, unable to withstand the influx of cheap goods, are closing their production facilities. Many people try to sell glass items under the guise of crystal; this is a marketing ploy designed for a not very knowledgeable consumer.
Gifts as a symbol of the era, huge paintings, sculptures, carpets self made and of course, crystal products, court officials pampered their idols with such offerings, and all on a royal scale. Crystal was given to “high-ranking people” and in tsarist times, during the Soviet period, they still give crystal now.
Melting crystal
Crystal is also glass, but lead oxide is necessarily added to it, which gives the material completely new properties, such as transparency and melodious ringing. In addition to lead, crystal also contains other components, such as antimony and arsenic. Everything is poured into a huge, three-story building, oven, and about a hundred tons of crystal are boiled in it.
Is the lead component of crystal dangerous or not?
Lead experts explain this:
When the crystal mass is melted, the lead is already in a chemical bond with other components of the glass and cannot be released anywhere else.
Therefore, crystal glassware is not at all dangerous.
Glass blowers and conveyor
Next, glassblowers get to work. For master glassblowers, everything is simple and harmonious: a soft glass ball is lowered into the desired mold made of heat-resistant steel. More complex things are blown without any preparations. In the next workshop there is a conveyor, scissors automatically cut off a piece of the melt, which is spit out onto a rotating mold, drawn, removed and the product is ready. Tea glasses, shot glasses, small glasses, etc. are made on conveyors. A rare crystal item is, of course, only a handmade product.
Annealing
An important stage in crystal production is the so-called “annealing” of the product - this is a process in which the temperature of heated crystal slowly drops to room temperature over four hours. If you cool the glass sharply, the outer layers will give off heat faster than the inner ones and the wine glass will simply burst.
Cutting
The next stage is cutting. At this stage, vases, wine glasses, trays are cut - wedge-shaped grooves are applied. The deeper and sharper the edges, the more the rays of light are refracted and reflected and the crystal begins to sparkle with all the colors of the rainbow.
Chemical grinding
Next comes chemical grinding of the crystal, including sulfur. The air in this workshop is saturated with caustic fumes, and after a few minutes the throat begins to sore. After applying the cut, the diamond edge becomes matte; to make it transparent, the products are placed in special cassettes, suspended on a special installation and alternately dipped in acid and water. Gradually, the top layer is corroded, and the surface becomes perfectly smooth and polished.
The end of the 70s in the Soviet family, crystal is considered a sign of wealth. Enterprises are increasing the pace and volume of production, tableware made from this material is becoming widespread and, as a result, the quality of crystal is decreasing. And today ordinary glass is in fashion, and crystal, if it remains the standard of refined taste, will only be for lovers of luxurious and expensive tableware.
Crystal is a type of glass that contains at least 24% lead or barium oxide. Such additives provide, in the language of jewelers, a “play of light”, and also increase the plasticity of the material - all this makes it possible to cut and carve crystal. Such procedures allow the crystal, like precious stones, more fully express your beauty.
Crystal got its name by analogy with rock crystal, the name of which, in turn, is derived from the Greek word “krystallos”, which translates as “ice”. It was probably the purity and transparency of this mineral that inspired the Greeks to associate it with ice. Rock crystal is a type of colorless quartz.
The creation of crystal was practiced back in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia at the dawn of glassmaking. However, crystal in its modern form was obtained only in 1676 by the English master George Ravenscroft.
What is the difference between crystal and glass
Crystal and glass are two materials that are made using completely different technologies and from different materials. It is these two factors that determine the differences between them, including in price categories.
Firstly, glass and crystal have different . Glass feels warmer to the touch and heats up quickly in your hands, while crystal cools the skin.
Secondly, crystal is much stronger. It can be broken, but it is more difficult to do. When broken, glass scatters into large pieces, while crystal breaks into small fragments. Over time, scratches, cracks, and tarnish appear on the glass. This does not happen with crystal.
In addition, if you look at an object through glass, the image will be slightly magnified. Crystal will give the object a bifurcation without magnification.
Finally, crystal, unlike glass, has a characteristic sound. When you run wet fingers over it, you can hear a pleasant ringing sound. And when two crystal products come into contact, a long-sounding hum is heard. The glass only makes a dull thud.
It is all of the above factors that make crystal an expensive collectible. When making crystal products, they are always decorated with engraving, carefully polished and gold foil, etching or matting are used in their decoration.
Crystal can also be colored: red, green, purple, etc. But keep in mind that on the market crystal is often replaced with ordinary glass, creating skillful fakes that only a specialist can distinguish.
To begin with, it is important to understand what crystal and glass are and what their fundamental differences are.
We all consciously and subconsciously love and appreciate natural things, realizing that natural is always better. No one will create such magnificent examples of true art as only Nature.
So is crystal - it has so many advantages that glass (an artificially obtained material) cannot in any way compare with it.
Crystalis a colorless quartz, an icicle-shaped mineral (krystallos means icicle in Greek). Glass is a material obtained mainly from a mixture of quartz sand (SiO 2), soda (Na 2 CO 3 ) and lime (CaO) and has no crystalline structure.
In addition, there isartificial crystal - glass with added lead. The purity of crystal depends on the % of lead. The higher the percentage, the purer and more expensive the crystal. The most expensive crystal contains more than 30% lead oxide, the cheapest - from 18% to 24%, and in the USA it is acceptable to call even glass with 1% lead crystal.
To create colored crystal coloring additives are used. Thus, blue tones are obtained by adding cobalt, red - cadmium or gold, pink - silicon, green - copper oxide, purple - manganese oxide. The famous Swarovski crystals are the same artificial crystal.
Crystal glass differs from crystal in lower lead content - from 4% to 15%. In addition, in crystal glass, part of the potassium is replaced by sodium, and part of the lead by zinc, barium, magnesium or calcium. As a rule, dishes, glasses, wine glasses, vases for the home and restaurants are made from it. In terms of its properties, it is harder than ordinary glass, but softer than crystal, so even dishwashers are safe for crystal glass. Crystal, including crystal glass products, can easily withstand temperature changes, so they can be scalded with boiling water or doused with ice water.
So, what distinguishes crystal from glass?
The main distinguishing property of crystal and glass is thermal conductivity. You can hold a crystal glass in your hands for a long time and it will not heat up, absorbing all the heat from your palms. With glass the situation is exactly the opposite - it heats up quite quickly on its surface, although the inside remains cold. So, in Ancient Rome Rich people used crystal to cool their bodies on hot days.
The second pleasant property of crystal is the ability to produce a gentle “crystal” ringing, music from contact with another crystal glass or from a light blow with a thin stick or even a fingernail.
Crystal is harder than glass. A crystal glass is almost impossible to scratch and quite difficult to break. This is a very nice advantage for expensive cookware. On the Mohs hardness scale it corresponds to a number 7. Only topaz (8), corundum (9) and diamond (10) are even harder.
There may be cracks or cloudiness in rock crystal, but there cannot be foreign bodies, bubbles or voids.
To understand that this is real crystal, carefully examine the glass in the light - it should not enlarge or distort the shape of objects. If you place a glass on a sheet of paper, the edge of the sheet will optically double. And lastly, crystal refracts light perfectly, so crystal products have a special shine and shine.
You can buy crystal glasses and decanters at the appropriate section
The word "crystal" itself has Greek roots. The Greeks used the word "crystal" to call quartz without foreign impurities, for its ideal transparency, considering it to be frozen ice. These crystals were used to make lenses that were used to light fire. There is even a known case when a samovar was made for Peter I from a huge piece of rock crystal - this is how transparent quartz without foreign inclusions began to be called in Russia. And the first manufactory producing crystal products appeared in our country in the 13th century in the city of Gus Khrustalny.
Types of crystal
The following types of crystal are distinguished:
- Rock crystal is natural quartz;
- Lead crystal is glass containing lead oxide;
- Barium crystal is crystal that uses barium instead of lead;
- Bohemian crystal is crystal that uses potassium-lime glass instead of lead and barium.
History of the appearance and properties of crystal
The idea of creating crystal from glass belongs to the British: they were the first to add lead oxides to it to improve the quality of glass, after which it acquired an unusual “voice”, transparency and sparkling edges. The “vocal” abilities of crystal, its transparency, strength, weight, shine and other properties depend on the percentage of lead oxide.
Gusev crystal is brewed with a lead oxide content strictly equal to 24%, which corresponds to amazing optical properties and high density. Thanks to this, we can observe the multicolor play of light in the edges, the shine of surfaces and hear a wonderful melodic ringing.
As the technology for producing crystal from silicon sand improved, it began to include the addition of, in addition to lead oxide, boric acid, arsenic and antimony compounds.
To create colored crystal, various additives are used: cobalt gives pure blue tones, for red - cadmium or gold compounds are added, for pink - silicon. What makes crystal green is copper oxide, and its exquisite purple imparted by manganese oxides.
IN tsarist times At the Gusevsky plant, crystal dishes and crystal vases were also painted using colloidal gold and uranium oxides.
These were quite expensive, but also the most beautiful pieces of art.
Typically, a crystal product is decorated with engraving - a shallow matte pattern, cutting - a wide polished edge, carving - deep grooves, at the intersection of which a mesh appears (the so-called “diamond edge”), and grinding.
After grinding, the edges acquire a special shine. Faceted crystal, refracting light, creates bright rainbow reflections.
Crystal production
To get crystal, you need to melt the charge from which the crystal is made. The charge is a mixture of sand, potash and lead oxide, and its presence is the main difference between crystal and simple glass.
The raw materials are melted in furnaces at enormous temperatures of over 1500 degrees Celsius. The molten mass cools very quickly. To speed up the process, several people work on one product at once.
Master blowers, typesetters and pressers work at the furnace. Blowers are armed with special tubes with a rubber bulb. A drop of hot crystal is taken at one end of the glass blowing tube and the product is blown into a mold using a rubber bulb. The master compositor has a typesetting tube. With its help, he collects the required amount of glass melt from the furnace and brings it to the press master, who controls the mold.
After the product is blown and given the required shape, it enters the furnace for annealing. Annealing is designed to cool the crystal more evenly. In the annealing oven, the temperature is reduced from 700 degrees to 40–50 degrees within 1.5 hours.
Next, in the flame of a gas burner, the upper part of the product, where there was a glass blowing tube, is cut off.
After this, the product undergoes the first quality control: are there any large bubbles, stones, or curvature of the leg; measure the thickness of the glass layer.
Smooth products are decorated with a diamond cut. To begin with, markings are applied to the product, after marking, the product is placed on a conveyor and goes from master to master. The process of applying a diamond edge starts with the largest abrasive wheel and ends with the smallest ones. To prevent glass dust from entering respiratory tract, water is supplied to the abrasive wheels.
Every housewife has crystal dishes in her home, which are taken out only on holidays and important events. Exquisite and luxurious items will decorate every event, adding gloss and elegance.
However, today there is fake crystal, which, in fact, turns out to be skillfully processed glass. In this article we will learn how to recognize a fake.
In laboratory conditions, the volume of lead oxide can be determined. Real crystal should contain 4-10% of this substance. Glass contains no more than four percent lead oxide. However, it is impossible to check the composition of products outside laboratory conditions. But you can use home methods that will help you determine whether it is crystal or glass in front of you.
Crystal dishes are much more expensive than similar materials. But high price does not guarantee the authenticity of the product. Therefore, please review and inspect items carefully before purchasing. We offer several easy methods that will tell you how to distinguish crystal from glass.
Nine ways to tell crystal from glass
- Crystal is always cooler than glass, provided that both objects are in the same conditions. When heated, crystal also heats up much more slowly;
- Crystal is more difficult to damage than glass. This material is more difficult to scratch, but do not forget that crystal products are still fragile. Therefore, they require careful handling and care;
- Take a closer look at the structure of the product. Small gas bubbles are noticeable on glass, but there are no such bubbles on crystal;
- Hold the product up to the light and look through the material. You will see streaks or flow lines on glass objects. There are no such lines on real crystal;
- When you look at objects through glass, they magnify slightly. If you look at objects through crystal, they split into two;
- Place your palm on the glass and it will quickly heat up. The crystal will remain cool;
- When conducting wet finger By natural material A clear and slightly ringing “crystal” sound will appear. U artificial products there is no such sound;
- If you hit the crystal with your fingers, the sound will increase and last, ringing and transparent, which is not typical for glass material. In the latter case, the sound is dull and short;
- The glass may contain foreign inclusions and gaseous bubbles; the crystal may at most contain small cracks and minor clouding.
How to distinguish a crystal chandelier from a fake
Such chandeliers look elegant and luxurious; they will make the interior rich and aristocratic. Such lamps look most elegant in the hall, living and dining rooms, and in country houses. But even in this case, devices are often counterfeited. Therefore, we will analyze separately how to distinguish a crystal chandelier from a glass one.
Carefully inspect the crystal pendants. They must be smooth, durable and strong without dents, chips, scratches, bubbles or stains. This material is distinguished by perfectly even and smooth planes and edges.
Remember that crystal heats up slowly and glass heats up quickly. Even if you hold the real pendant in your hands for a long time, it will remain cool.
Distinguish rhinestone from glass you can look through a separate pendant at the light or at objects. Through this material, objects will split into two, and when light hits it, it will remain transparent.
If it is fake, objects will become larger and flow lines will appear when light hits them. In addition, a real crystal chandelier must have a manufacturer’s certificate.
How to care for crystal
After you have chosen and distinguished crystal from fake, it is important to preserve the fragile material for a long time. To do this, you need to follow certain rules for caring for such products. Biggest problems creates a crystal chandelier, because cleaning such a bulky and heavy object is quite difficult.
