The First Mirrors

The first type of mirror was seen over two hundred years ago in Germany. It was German chemist Justus von Liebig In 1835, who invented a process for placing a thin layer of metallic silver onto one side of a pane of clear flat glass. The technique was soonfine tuned, which then allowed for the mass production of the mirror. London Glazing supply mirrored glass. The modern mirrors we use today may have started in the 19th century, but mirrors themselves have actually been around for much longer. After a review in 2006 by vision scientist Dr. Jay Enoch that featured in the journal Optometry and Vision Science, the first mirrors were made by people in Turkey from ground and polished obsidian (volcano glass) around 8,000 years ago. Mirrors have been discovered in what is now Iraq and Egypt that were made of polished copper and date from 3000-4000 B.C. Approximately 1000 years after, the people in Central and South America began to make mirrors from polished stone, while Chinese and Indian mirror crafters made them from bronze. London Glaziers use flat glass. Pliny the Elder, the Roman author from the first century A.D. mentions to the first recorded use of glass mirrors in his encyclopedia Natural History. However, the mirrors never really came into widespread use at the time. Many different cultures independently created reflective mirrors at various periods throughout history, but maybe nature should be hailed as the true pioneer of the looking glass. The very first mirrors most probably were still water pools and rock or clay containers full of water, wrote. Of course, these natural mirrors pale in comparison to the mass produced mirrors made today. Not every person in the world has lauded the introduction of mirrors. An anthropologist in the 1970s took mirrors to the isolated Biami people of Papua New Guinea, the tribe reportedly met their reflections with horror, rather than amazement.