The Unbreakable glass of Ancient Rome

The unbreakable glass of ancient Rome, also known as flexible glass, was a invented by a man who subsequently beheaded by Tiberius Caesar, who feared the price of gold and silver would drop. Tiberius had the man's workshop destroyed as well, and the unnamed inventor took his secret to the grave. So what if this hadn't happened, and Tiberius had allowed the inventor to live? This 'flexible glass' could have been something along the lines of a cellulose-based plastic, or more likely the 'unbreakability' comes from an addition of borax acid, which was naturally occuring and in the region. So what would have been the effect of this unbreakable glass on the history of the world?
 
The unbreakable glass of ancient Rome, also known as flexible glass, was a invented by a man who subsequently beheaded by Tiberius Caesar, who feared the price of gold and silver would drop. Tiberius had the man's workshop destroyed as well, and the unnamed inventor took his secret to the grave. So what if this hadn't happened, and Tiberius had allowed the inventor to live? This 'flexible glass' could have been something along the lines of a cellulose-based plastic, or more likely the 'unbreakability' comes from an addition of borax acid, which was naturally occuring and in the region. So what would have been the effect of this unbreakable glass on the history of the world?

Sturdier shop windows.
 
Could slightly improve the Empire's trade deficit, as the West would now have a (probably) unique manufactured good that could be traded in exchange for Eastern luxuries like Silk and Spices. Of course transporting plate glass is a lot more difficult than pepper, so I would expect its availably to be rather limited outside of the Med. region.
 
Hadrian's Crystal Palace


crystal-palace-00838-640.jpg
 
This is a sad time for the Med, invention-wise. It's the last generation when there were many. This kind of thing happened to inventors all the time under the unchecked monarchic Empire. Plenty of emperors and their governors saw smart men as potential threats to their rules and came up with excuse after excuse to stop them. Some emperors even saw that game as fun,

Under the Republic, people were allowed freedoms, including of private invention, and had rights, enforced by the widest checks and balances maybe ever. Subjects are a different matter, and certainly couldn't enforce any because there were no checks on power anymore.

And, the last channels of money available under the Republic were vanishing. Roman bankers appear to've vanished during this period. Provincial money had been drying up via corruption, increasingly during the late Republic. Roman money was dried up, in turn, increasingly, as the Emperors and bribes for imperial guards absorbed more and more; the process was finished during Caligula's reign.

Maybe you could have a friend warn him of the dangers of imperial visits, and urge he contact glass and luxury stores instead. He'd have trouble getting loans, though, and have to live poor; no storefront for him for a long time.


No - plastic's right out, I'm afraid. This can work becuase it was an incremental change.
 
This is a sad time for the Med, invention-wise. It's the last generation when there were many. This kind of thing happened to inventors all the time under the unchecked monarchic Empire. Plenty of emperors and their governors saw smart men as potential threats to their rules and came up with excuse after excuse to stop them. Some emperors even saw that game as fun

Too true. I highly recommend a book called "The Forgotten Revolution: How Science was Born in 300BC and Why it had to be Reborn" by Lucio Russo. It is a sobering, even disheartening read, about how the nascent scientific revolution that had begin in Hellenistic times was strangled in its crib by the Roman power, going into some detail about how exactly the new scientific method was suppressed and eventually forgotten. It convinced me that the Roman Empire may have been among the worst things to happen in history, simply because of its hugely negative effect on the progress of science and hence technology. And yes, it was worse than the actual Dark Ages in that regard, since science as we know it was already long dead by then.
 
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