law of diminishing returns. A concept in economics that if one factor of production (number of workers, for example) is increased while other factors (machines and workspace, for example) are held constant, the output per unit of the variable factor will eventually diminish.
History of glass. The history of glassmaking can be traced back to 3500 BCE in Mesopotamia, but Mesopotamians may have created second-rate copies of glass objects from Egypt, where this complex craft actually originated. Other archaeological evidence suggests that the first true glass was made in coastal north Syria, Mesopotamia or Egypt.
We've known about the 'wet-finger-around-the-wine-glass' idea since Renaissance times âone of the first people to write about that phenomenon was Galileo. Sets of water-tuned glasses on which you can play tunes were popularized in England by Pockridge and Gluck in the early 1700's. In 1761 Benjamin Franklin was in London representing the Pennsylvania Legislature to Parliament.