The Society of Glass Technology (SGT) recently published its first volume of Historical Papers in Glass Science & Technology under the title The First Symposium on the Constitution of Glass (Society of Glass Technology, Sheffield, England, 2012).

This volume contains facsimile copies of eight papers and discussion notes from a 1925 symposium of the same title organized by W.E.S. Turner. It also contains two related papers and updated notes published by the SGT in 1927. The editor of this new volume, Adrian C. Wright (professor emeritus, University of Reading, United Kingdom), added two significant papers on diffraction studies of glass structure, published by the SGT in 1930, and a translation of an important paper by Lebedev, from 1921. This collection of papers provides a fascinating snapshot of the state of glass science immediately before the publication of Zachariasen’s seminal paper, “The atomic arrangement in glass,” in 1932.¹