Mirrors By Patricia Holland At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

What do you want from your Commercial Mirror? Most commercial mirrors are plane mirrors with a flat surface that has been polished and therefore reflects light. Common uses for Commercial Mirrors are personal grooming, decoration and architecture. However, curved mirrors also exist and have a variety of uses including focusing light, magnifying light or manipulating light in some manner. Other mirrors are used in scientific equipment such as telescopes, cameras, lasers and industrial machinery. Most commercial mirrors are designed to reflect visible light but there are other types of mirrors designed for other wavelengths of light. Some of these mirrors are used in optical instruments.

History about Mirrors

Probably the earliest mirrors made by man were polished stone mirrors. Obsidian, a volcanic glass, was used to make mirrors as far back as 6000 BC in Anatolia which is modern-day Turkey. Other stone mirrors from Central and South America have been dated from around 2000 BC. Early mirrors were also made from polished copper and examples exit from 4000 BC in Mesopotamia and 3000 BC in ancient Egypt. Bronze mirrors were made in early China around 2000 BC.

Mirror technology improved with the invention of metal-coated glass. Historians believe this development occurred in Sidon (modern-day Lebanon) sometime during the first century. The Romans developed glass mirrors backed with gold leaf sometime during or before the first century. And the Romans also developed crude mirrors with a technique of coating blown glass with molten lead.

The Arab physicist, Ibn Sahl, enhanced the understanding of how curved mirrors and lenses bend and focus light in the tenth century. He is generally credited with discovering the law of refraction. Understanding the law of refraction helped him develop lens shapes (concave, convex, parabolic) for focusing light and solving the problem of finding the point on a convex mirror at which a light ray coming from one point is reflected to another point. Sometime later, in the eleventh century, glass makers in Moorish Spain were making clear glass mirrors.

Although the exact time and place are not known, a superior tin-mercury amalgam combination was discovered for coating glass during the early Renaissance. During the 16th century Venice became a center known for its glass-making and mirror production technique. At this time the process was very expensive so only those with substantial funds could afford these superior mirrors. The French and the Germans also made mirrors during this time but they were of lesser quality and therefore less expensive.

The modern silvered-glass mirror was developed by German chemist Justus von Liebig in 1835. He used a chemical process to deposit a very thin layer of metallic silver onto glass and this led to lower cost and greater affordability. Mirrors were then mass produced and available to large numbers of people. Today mirrors are produced in a similar process using either aluminum or silver on a glass substrate.

What Mirrors Offer

Our Commercial Mirrors offer various alternatives for the buyer. Our Stainless Steel Mirror is the most vandal-resistant and is unbreakable. It is highly polished stainless steel without a frame. It has a No. 8 architectural bright finish and is made from type 304 stainless steel.

Other models of our Commercial Mirrors offer plate glass or an alternative reflective surface. They are mounted in a satin finish stainless steel angle frame with welded corners. The mounting is very secure and theft resistant.

Our Commercial Mirrors also have two options for plate glass – tempered and laminated. Each option has its advantages. Tempered glass has been heated to a very high temperature and then quickly cooled. The result is that tempered glass is four times stronger than ordinary glass and has greater impact and thermal resistance. Commercial Mirrors using tempered glass will have slight flaws and distortions. Laminated glass does not have these advantages of tempered glass but it does provide a higher quality reflectivity for a higher quality commercial mirror.

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