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Want to know more about decorative tiles? Well, technically, a tile is a piece of hard material (ceramic, stone, glass, or even metal) used to cover surfaces like walls, floors, ceilings, roofs, or tabletops.
The word &#;tile&#; derives from the Latin word &#;tegula,&#; which is the clay roof tile used over years ago to cover the roof of a house.
The English word is much more recent, though, from the beginning of the 20th century, referring to the noise over the roof clay tiles that wild cats would make while playing in the night in England.
In reality, tiles are much older than that -some form of tile goes back as 25,000 years!
Ceramic tiles as we know them were popular in Ancient Egypt in BC, while glass tiles became popular around BC.
During the Roman and Greek empires, tiles became one of the primary types of decorations.
These tiles were used to cover surfaces and make them more durable while at the same time represent images of events or legends of that time.
Decorative tiles were used as paintings to give life to the artists&#; imagination.
A good example is the Roman villas spread throughout Italy, which still today are covered floor to ceiling in marvelous images of kings, battles, landscapes, animals, and myths of the time.
During medieval times, tile production was perfected for the embellishment of noble palaces and monasteries. The clay was precut into pieces, flattened and air-dried, then glazed with lead ore, and finally fired.
Often, the surface of the tiles was coated in gold to create grand statements of power.
Think about the front of the Orvieto Cathedral in Italy, with a large rose window in the center, golden mosaics over the entire facade, and three colossal bronze doors.
During the 16th century, the technique to make encaustic tiles disappeared with the dissolution of the monasteries. It will come back much later, to stay until our present days.
During Queen Victoria&#;s reign, decorated wall tiles became of general use and started to be mass-produced and then installed in several public buildings, churches, shops, and even private homes, mainly for their practical use.
Decorated tiles became more commonly used in the s when the beautiful hand-painted glazed tiles from Holland created such a high demand that the English manufacturers started making their own version on a larger scale.
Such a high request for tiles led Herbert Minton, a tile manufacturer, to revamp the technique of encaustic tiles with an additional dust-pressing process, inventing the modern tile manufacturing method.
Encaustic tiles are made by combining a plain clay base with a stamped area, then filled with colored liquid clay, then fired to fuse the different layers together.
With the large availability of these decorative tiles, many different designs were now available in 6 different colors to suit both public buildings like churches and palaces and more modest private homes.
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Nowadays, we have brought decorative tile into the future, using prints to reproduce the design of the original encaustic tiles into pure dry-pressed porcelain tiles.
A great example is one of our favorites, the MARRAKESH line of Moroccan look tiles.
We can now appreciate the elegant and classic designs of the Victorian era in our own homes without renouncing the latest technologies that make porcelain tiles the most &#;maintenance-free&#; covering option for all our surfaces.
To read more about what tiles are made of, read our blog post dedicated to the difference between Porcelain vs. Ceramics.
Ceramics is one of the most ancient industries going back thousands of years. Once humans discovered that clay could be found in abundance and formed into objects by first mixing with water and then firing, a key industry was born. The oldest known ceramic artifact is dated as early as 28,000 BCE (BCE = Before Common Era), during the late Paleolithic period. It is a statuette of a woman, named the Venus of Dolní Věstonice, from a small prehistoric settlement near Brno, in the Czech Republic. In this location, hundreds of clay figurines representing Ice Age animals were also uncovered near the remains of a horseshoe-shaped kiln.
The first examples of pottery appeared in Eastern Asia several thousand years later. In the Xianrendong cave in China, fragments of pots dated to 18,000-17,000 BCE have been found. It is believed that from China the use of pottery successively spread to Japan and the Russian Far East region where archeologists have found shards of ceramic artifacts dating to 14,000 BCE.
Use of ceramics increased dramatically during the Neolithic period, with the establishment of settled communities dedicated to agriculture and farming. Starting approximately in 9,000 BCE, clay-based ceramics became popular as containers for water and food, art objects, tiles and bricks, and their use spread from Asia to the Middle East and Europe. The early products were just dried in the sun or fired at low temperature (below 1,000°C) in rudimentary kilns dug into the ground. Pottery was either monochrome or decorated by painting simple linear or geometric motifs.
It is known that, around 7,000 BCE, people were already using sharp tools made from obsidian, a natural occurring volcanic glass. The Roman historian Pliny reported that the first man-made glass was accidentally produced by Phoenician merchants in 5,000 BCE, when, while resting on a beach, they placed cooking pots on sodium-rich rocks near a fire. The heat from the fire melted the rocks and mixed them with the sand, forming molten glass.
Archeologists have not been able to confirm Pliny&#;s recount. Instead, simple glass items, such as beads, have been discovered in Mesopotamia and Egypt dating to 3,500 BCE. At the beginning of the Bronze Age, glazed pottery was produced in Mesopotamia. However, it was not until 1,500 BCE that Egyptians started building factories to create glassware for ointments and oils.
One of the first breakthroughs in the fabrication of ceramics was the invention of the wheel, in 3,500 BCE. The introduction of the wheel allowed for the utilization of the wheel-forming technique to produce ceramic artifacts with radial symmetry.
Meanwhile, ceramic pottery evolved in its use of increasingly elaborated paintings, so that these objects eventually became genuine pieces of art. Decorations also involved the use oxidizing and reducing atmosphere during firing to achieve special effects. Greek Attic vases of the 6th and 5th centuries BCE are considered the apex of this evolution.
Throughout the 16th century CE (CE = Common Era), earthenware remained the main class of ceramic products manufactured in Europe and the Middle East. The Chinese were the first to introduce high temperature kilns capable of reaching up to °C, and, around 600 CE, developed porcelain (a material with less than 1% porosity) from kaolin clay. During the Middle Ages, trade through the Silk Road allowed for the introduction and diffusion of porcelain throughout Islamic countries first and later in Europe, due in large part to the journeys of Marco Polo.
By the 15th century the earliest blast furnaces were developed in Europe, capable of reaching up to 1,500°C. They were used to melt iron and were initially constructed from natural materials. When synthetic materials with better resistance to high temperatures (called refractories) were developed in the 16th century, the industrial revolution was born. These refractories created the necessary conditions for melting metals and glass on an industrial scale, as well as for the manufacture of coke, cement, chemicals, and ceramics.
Since then, the ceramic industry has gone through a profound transformation. Not only have traditional ceramics and glass become ubiquitous, but over the years new products have been developed to take advantage of the unique properties of these materials, such as their low thermal and electrical conductivity, high chemical resistance, and high melting point. Around the first porcelain electrical insulators were introduced, starting the era of technical ceramics.
After World War II, ceramics and glass have contributed to the growth of many technologically advanced fields, including electronics, optoelectronics, medical, energy, automotive, aerospace and space exploration. In addition, innovations in ceramic processing and characterization techniques have enabled the creation of materials with tailored properties that meet the requirements of specific and customized applications. In recent years, ceramic processing has gained new vigor from nanotechnology, which is allowing manufacturers to introduce materials and products with unconventional properties, such as transparent ceramics, ductile ceramics, hyperelastic bones, and microscopic capacitors.
All these advances are expected to drive the global ceramic and glass industry to become a nearly 1.1 trillion dollar market in , up from an estimated $800 billion in .
A summary of the most relevant milestones in the history of ceramics and glass is provided in the table below.
Year(s)Development 28,000 BCECeramic figurines are used for ceremonial purposes. 18,000 BCEChinese pottery appears. 18,000 BCE to 14,000 BCECeramic pottery spreads in Eastern Asia. 9,000 BCECeramic products, such as vases, bricks, and tiles, become popular in the Middle East and Europe. 7,000 BCESharp tools made from natural glass appear. 5,000 BCEPhoenician merchants possibly make the first glass. 3,500 BCESimple glass items are fabricated in Mesopotamia and Egypt. 3,500 BCEThe wheel is invented, which will later be applied in wheel-forming of pottery. 3,000 BCEGlazed pottery is produced in Mesopotamia. 1,500 BCEEgyptians start building factories for production of glassware. 700 BCECeramic pottery becomes artwork in Attic Greece. 600 CE600 CE Chinese introduce porcelain. sHigh-temperature furnaces are developed in Europe for metallurgical use. sHigh-temperature refractory materials are introduced to build furnaces for making steel, glass, ceramics, and cements, leading the way to the industrial revolution. Mid s Porcelain electrical insulators and incandescent light bulbs are invented. sHigh-strength quartz-enriched porcelain for insulators, alumina spark plugs, glass windows for automobiles, and ceramic capacitors are introduced. sResearch on oxide magnetic materials (ferrites) and ferroelectric materials begins. sCeramic capacitors based on barium titanate are developed. sAlumina insulators for voltages over 220 kV are introduced and applications for carbides and nitrides are developed. The first yttria-based transparent ceramic is invented. Bioglass is also discovered. sPartially stabilized zirconia is developed. High-performance cellular ceramic substrates for catalytic converter and particulate filters for diesel engines are commercialized. sCeramic high-temperature superconductors are developed. sMultilayer ceramic circuits (low-temperature co-fired ceramics) are commercialized. Low-fusing ceramics are introduced for dental prostheses. The first whisker-reinforced alumina composites are fabricated by hot-pressing. Polycrystalline neodymium-yttrium aluminum garnets for solid-state lasers are developed. Late sNanotechnology initiatives begin proliferating worldwide. Late sThe robocasting process for 3D printing of ceramics is developed. sBy creating ZrB2/HfB2-based composites that resist temperatures up to 2,200°C, NASA revives interest in the development of ultrahigh temperature ceramics (UHTCs) for fabrication of hypersonic aircraft and reusable space vehicles. sVarious processes are being developed for 3D printing of technical ceramics. In the first hyperelastic bone is created by 3D printing.
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