Graham Taylor

No such thing as a stupid question.

Well, it all starts with clay, I suppose, except that glass also sort of falls into the category of ceramic as well.

So it's a little bit blurred at the edges.

But basically, clay is an aluminum hydro silica.

So what does that mean?

Basically, it means that you've got this very strange material, which is composed of little flat platelets.

And those little flat platelets, when you add water to them, will glide over one another because their little chemical bonds are weak enough to let you shape them.

So it's this wonderful material that you can manipulate around and shape into things.

When you've dried it out, and you have to thoroughly dry it out, we might talk about fire and things later, what you've got is a pot which still has some chemically combined moisture in there.

And when you start to heat it up, the first few hundred degrees are really quite dangerous because it can turn to super steam in there and blow the whole thing apart.

And anybody who did pottery at school probably had their teacher tell them that they'd left air bubbles in the clay because their pot blew up and ruined everybody else's work.

And in actual fact, it's just the teacher was firing the kiln too darn fast.

That's all it is.

No guilt, no guilt.

But as you reach about 550 degrees Celsius...

those platelets start to melt together on the edges.

They start to fuse together at the edges.

And it's once you cross that boundary that you end up with ceramic.

You end up with pottery, which basically means that if you wet it again, it's not going to turn soft and moldable again.

And that takes you up to 550 Celsius.