Glass Spheres (small)

These little peppercorn sized transparent glass spheres are made from soda-lime glass, familiar to us as the glass used for drinking vessels, bottles and windows. It is reusable and recyclable. In science, glass has a much broader definition than this transparent substance, referring to any solid that has a non-crystalline, or amorphous internal structure. It is a myth that glass is always liquid/is always flowing; it only starts to become a liquid when heated at 550°C and is fully liquid at around 1000°C.

Glass spheres are perhaps most familiar to us a marbles, but smaller, industrially produced glass spheres like this are known as ballotini, from the Italian for 'small balls'. Their main applications include reflective filler for road-marking paint and as abrasives for shot blasting and metal polishing. However, they can also be engineered into perfectly regular spheres for use as spacers in adhesives, to ensure a perfectly uniform thickness of bond, or for use as special bearings for oil drilling mechanics