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New Zealand Tablet, 3 August 1911, Page 1481

According to Pliny, the discovery of glass-making was purely accidental. He tells us that two merchants were carrying a quanity of nitre over a desolate tract of country, and at length paused upon the banks of a river to rest. Wishing to partake of some food, they built a fire, and not finding any stones on which to place their kettles, they put them on some pieces of nitre. The heat from the fires melted the nitre, which mixed with the sand and formed a transparent matter, which was glass.