Oxide glasses are among the oldest known types of man-made materials (Harden 1968); they have become ubiquitous in modern life, from windows, containers and tableware to optical fiber. Even before any synthetic glass was ever produced, glasses occurring in nature were already used in the form of tools or jewelry. While for the latter, the peculiar optical properties of transparent variants of natural glasses (such as Libyan desert glass) were of interest, knives or arrowheads made from obsidian benefitted from the characteristic mechanical behavior, which manifests in sharp fracture edges and high stiffness. There are various natural processes...
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