Joe Badilla, age 11, of Tucson, Arizona for his question:

Who invented glass?

We will never be able to build a Statue to the parson who invented shiny glass for we don't know who he was, The invention was a long long ago, before anyone thought it was important to honor great inventors.

Maybe sand, lime and soda were blended accidentally in an ancient pot, Maybe some young experimenter was trying various brews and, to his astonishment, came up with a sticky, shiny substance which cooled into brittle glass. In any case, we know that people were making glass 5,000 years ago and using it to glaze bits of pottery,

Great heat is necessary to make glass and for this reason the shiny stuff was very valuable in early days. It is thought that the colored glass beads of Ancient Egypt were as valuable as the emeralds and rubies they copied.