That white tube, called a blank, already has most of the attributes of the end product; all the ways that glass will treat light are already built in. “When you make that,” Mazzali said, “you know exactly that that fiber will have that dispersion, that attenuation, that geometry, all that.”
When companies transform the blank by pulling or “drawing” it into a single skinny glass strand thousands of kilometers long (think of pulling a very long single strand from a thick skein of wool), all they’re doing is making the chunky blank thinner.
Mazzali was warming to his task. “Now,” he said, “you have to transform this coarse white thing into glass.” The fat tube certainly did not look like glass to me. “So now we go to the next step, consolidation.”
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Consolidation involves placing the chalky thick blank into a giant furnace. The heat gets all the water out of the blank, and then the material starts to consolidate, or “sinter.” This sintering step transforms it into a transparent and smaller thing that is labeled a “preform.”
Mazzali handed me a sample transformed preform, sleek and transparent, about the same size as a very large salami from a local supermarket. The ceramic rod on which the soot had been printed was gone.
