Section Three: Reading ComprehensionQuestions 1-9
Glass fibers have a long history. The Egyptians made coarse fibers by 1600 B.C., and
fibers survive as decorations on Egyptian pottery dating back to 1375 B c. During the
Renaissance (fifteenth and sixteenth centuries A.D.), glassmakers from Venice used glass
Line fibers to decorate the surfaces of plain glass vessels. However, glassmakers guarded their
(5) secrets so carefully that no one wrote about glass fiber production until the early
seventeenth century.
The eighteenth century brought the invention of "spun glass" fibers. Rene-Antoine de
Reaumur, a French scientist, tried to make artificial feathers from glass. He made fibers
by rotating a wheel through a pool of molten glass, pulling threads of glass where the hot
(10) thick liquid stuck to the wheel. His fibers were short and fragile, but he predicted that
spun glass fibers as thin as spider silk would be flexible and could be woven into fabric.
By the start of the nineteenth century, glassmakers learned how to make longer, stronger
fibers by pulling them from molten glass with a hot glass tube. Inventors wound the
cooling end of the thread around a yarn reel, then turned the reel rapidly to pull more fiber
(15) from the molten glass. Wandering tradespeople began to spin glass fibers at fairs, making
decorations and ornaments as novelties for collectors, but this material was of little
practical use; the fibers were brittle, ragged, and no longer than ten feet, the circumference
of the largest reels. By the mid-1870's, however, the best glass fibers were finer than silk
and could be woven into fabrics or assembled into imitation ostrich feathers to decorate
(20) hats. Cloth of white spun glass resembled silver; fibers drawn from yellow-orange glass
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