Looking Glass To Mirrors To Selfies

But when Louis XIV of France wanted to create what would become the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, he went to the Venetians and bribed a group of craftsmen to defect and smuggledthem and their finishes out. An assassin was sent to France and a couple of tradesmen wound up dead, but the secret was out. This would have been in the 1600s.

In 1836, a German chemist developed a technique using silver salt on metallic silver. He would then place it on a cast-iron table and cover it with wool felt to keep warm with steam. Silver nitrate was then poured onto the glass and left to “cook” for an hour to produce a lustrous silver coating which was then protected with shellac and paint on the back.

Figure 10 French oval mirror with candleholders Figure 9 Antique French Cheval Mirro r Today’s mirrors can have melted silver applied to the back of glass, but now it is even likely to be aluminum, which creates a highly reflective surface. Mirror makers stopped using mercury in the 1840s. Today’s glass is thicker and colorless, while old glass is less pure, thinner, and often with a high lead content. Currently, we have gone even further with an augmented reality smart mirror which uses a camera and display, or a reflective surface combined with AR software to enable virtual try-ons! So, we have gone from looking into still water to artificial intelligence! What’s next?