Nick Szabo  🔑

https://mobile.twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/948420771205988352 …

The glass-encased compass, hourglass, portolani maps, and Ptolemaic maps (projecting 3D->2D), with latitude & longitude grids), along with daring curiosity to learn new winds in the Atlantic, gave us the exploration explosion: https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2012/10/dead-reckoning-and-exploration-explosion.html … https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-very-underrated-invention.html …

Since wine rather than hot tea was their source of safe water, the use of glass for containers, later for windows, mirrors, & instruments such as prisms and primitive (e.g. spherical) lenses was far more common in Europe than in other cultures.

Glass allowed chemists to safely contain yet observe. It played a key role in the 17c scientific revolution -- microscopic biology, telescopic astronomy, and global exploration. The barometer led to understanding air & vacuum, enabling the steam engine.

Before the solid-state transistors & integrated circuits that gave it the name "Silicon" Valley, that region was a locus of innovation in glass vacuum tubes, the key mid-20th-century tech for radios, televisions, guidance & control, electronic warfare, radar, & early computers.