Today’s mirrors are made of sheets of glass with aluminum or silver coating. While it may seem simple, it took a long time to get to this point. Understanding the history of these items helps you appreciate human ingenuity and how much work it took to create everyday objects. Here’s all about how they came to be.

Polished Stone & Metal

The oldest known material used for its reflective properties is polished stone, such as volcanic obsidian artifacts found in Turkey that date back to 6000 B.C. More recent polished stone reflective devices were found in Central and South America and date to around 2000 B.C.

During ancient Greco-Roman times, people used curved circles of highly polished metals like tin, bronze, and silver to look at their reflection. These early mirrors were small to medium in size and often held by hand because they took time to craft, and the materials were hard to come by. Because of this, wealthy or influential populations used them mainly.

Glass & Metal

In the first century A.D., Romans began pouring molten lead onto glass sheets to create more efficient reflecting surfaces, taking a large step closer to the metal-backed creations of today. Then, during the early 1800s, the German chemist Justus von Liebig discovered that he could coat glass with metallic silver through chemical reduction. He used silver nitrate and a sugar solution to create an evenly-coated piece of glass that was more effective at showing reflections than previous methods. These early pieces were used to improve microscopes and telescopes.

His improvement upon reflective devices made creating them much simpler and more affordable, enabling them to become a standard part of the average household. Soon, their use expanded beyond the handheld scope to be incorporated in furniture, frames, and larger pieces. Today’s current method of manufacturing them—sputtering aluminum or silver onto glass in a vacuum—was derived straight from Liebig’s innovation.

Do you need new mirrors? The experts at Economy Glass & Window in Cincinnati, OH, has been providing quality glass services since 1980, including replacement windows, tabletops, tempered glass, and sliding glass doors. If glass breaks in your home, they’ll perform a thorough cleanup of the pieces during their glass and window repair so that your safety isn’t compromised. See some of their products online, and call (513) 661-7748 for a quote.