Beads as such have been used by man for his entertainment or as a decoration since ancient times. The oldest known marbles date back to the ancient Egypt to around 3000 B.C. Beads are known from ancient Crete or from the indigenous inhabitants of North Africa. At that time, however, the marbles were made of pebbles, semi-precious stones, marble or carved from bones.
Glass marbles have a much more recent history. Historians argue over where glass marbles first began to be produced in large numbers. Some say it was in Venice, others believe it was in the German town of Lauscha in a glassworks founded in 1590 by Christoff Mülleren and Hans Greiner. Around 1846, a German glassmaker from this glassworks – Elias Johann Christoph Simon Carl Greiner – invented a special pair of scissors which he used to cut soft glass into beads. With these scissors, the production of glass beads was greatly simplified, but it was still handmade.
The first machine production of glass beads was introduced in the United States in 1902 by Martin Frederik Christensen, a Dane who emigrated from Denmark in 1867. His company operated until 1917, when production had to stop due to lack of energy (natural gas).
After the First World War, the production of glass marbles slowly began to be introduced in more glassworks, not only for entertainment and decoration, but at this time the first glass marbles for technical use were produced. New methods of production were invented. Today there are four basic methods of machine production, which are used to produce all technical glass marbles in the world.
There are only a few companies in the world that specialise in the manufacture and sale of glass beads. Among them is our company, which offers the widest range of glass and ceramic marbles.