Mirror

a polished surface used especially to reflect the face of a person as an aid in making the toilet. The earliest known mirrors were made of metal. The Japanese still manufacture mirrors of this sort. Steel, silver, and a compound of copper were used for the purpose. Several bronze mirrors from ancient Greece, Etruria, and Rome are now preserved in museums of antiquities. One in the British Museum is thought to date from about 500 B. C.

Glass mirrors, composed of polished glass, with a backing of tinfoil or other material, did not became common before the sixteenth century. Prior to that time, small hand mirrors were carried by ladies at their girdles. They consisted of thin, circular plates of polished metal, fixed in a shallow box of gold, silver, enamel, ebony, or other costly material. The box was set often with costly jewels. The making of glass mirrors was a specialty of the Venetians, the original glass workers of Europe. A cylinder of glass was first blown, then split and laid flat. When it had cooled the edges were beveled and the back was covered with an amalgam. Venetian glass mirrors or looking-glasses soon supplanted those of metal. A Venetian mirror, forty-six by twenty-six inches, in a silver frame, is mentioned as one of the chief treasures of Colbert, Louis XIV's great minister of finance.

The Venetians forbade the citizens to acquaint foreigners with the methods of mirror making under heavy penalty. Nevertheless, in 1665, a colony of Venetian mirror makers was established in Paris. French mirror have ever since held high rank. Until the middle of the nineteenth century mirrors were made almost universally by causing a sheet of tinfoil to adhere to the back of the glass. Since that time the backing has been formed of a liquid too technical in its makeup for discussion here. Of late, platinum backing, applied by means of a fine brush and precipitation, has grown in favor with the makers of cheap looking-glasses.

In addition to the large number of mirrors imported from France and elsewhere, about $8,000,000 worth are made in the United States annually. There were, in 1900, 103 establishments, employing 2,555 operatives.