Most histories of the discovery of glass manufacture mention Pliny's account of the accidental discovery of glass making by ship-wrecked Phoenician sailors; Pliny tells us that they set their cooking pots on blocks of natron (soda) which was part of their cargo. The following morning, the sailors discovered that the heat of their cooking fires had melted the mixture of beach sand and soda which had solidified into glass.

Modern scholars consider that, while Pliny was a very energetic collector of materialm he was not always accurate and it is more likely that the manufacture of glass was discovered accidentally by Egyptian or Mesopotamian potters during the process of firing their pots.

The earliest known man-made glass is in the form of Egyptian opaque beads which date from between 2750 and 2625 BC. These were made by winding a thin string of molten glass around a removable clay core.