A tile is a manufactured piece of hard-wearing material such as ceramic, stone, porcelain, metal or even glass. Tiles are generally used for covering roofs, floors, and walls. They have been made for thousands of years.
Tiles can be simple square tiles or arranged in complex mosaics. Tiles are most often made from ceramic, with a hard glaze finish.
At the end of the 20th century, the technology of porcelain and glass tiles advanced, making them cheaper. They became more commonplace.
Roof tiles are designed mainly to keep out rain, and are traditionally made from locally available materials such as clay or slate. Modern materials such as concrete and plastic are also used and some clay tiles have a waterproof glaze.
A large number of shapes (or "profiles") of roof tiles have evolved.
Fired roof tiles are found as early as the 3rd millennium BC in the "House of the tiles" in Lerna, Greece. Debris found at the site contained thousands of terracotta tiles having fallen from the roof. In the Mycenaean period, roofs tiles are documented for Gla and Midea.
Bellini
Bellini can mean several people or things, including
Gouda
Gouda can mean:
Porcelain
Porcelain is a ceramic material made by heating clay-type materials to high temperatures. It includes clay in the form of kaolinite.
There is a distinction between hard-paste porcelain, fired at 1400 degrees Celsius, and soft-paste porcelain, fired at 1200 C. Bone china is soft-paste porcelain made from bone ash and kaolinite.
The raw materials for porcelain are mixed with water and form a plastic paste. The paste is worked to a required shape before firing in a kiln.
Porcelain originated in China, and 'china' is the common name of the product. By the Eastern Han dynasty period (196–220 AD) glazed ceramic wares had developed into porcelain. Porcelain manufactured during the Tang Dynasty (618–906 AD) was exported to the Islamic world, where it was highly prized. Early porcelain of this type includes the tri-colour glazed porcelain, or "sancai" wares. Porcelain items in the sense that we know them today could be found in the Tang Dynasty, and archaeological finds have pushed the dates back to as early as the Han Dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD). By the Sui Dynasty (581–618) and Tang Dynasty (618–907), porcelain was widely produced.
In 1712, many of the Chinese porcelain secrets were revealed in Europe by the French Jesuit father Francois Xavier d'Entrecolles, and published in "Lettres édifiantes et curieuses de Chine par des missionnaires jésuites".
Early in the 16th century, Portuguese traders returned home with samples of kaolin clay, which they discovered in China to be essential in the production of porcelain wares. However, the Chinese techniques and composition used to manufacture porcelain were not yet fully understood.
In the German state of Saxony, the search concluded in 1708 when Ehrenfried von Tschirnhaus produced a hard, white, translucent type of porcelain with kaolin clay and alabaster, mined from a Saxon mine in Colditz. It was a closely guarded trade secret of the Saxon enterprise.
Von Tschirnhaus and his assistant Johann Friedrich Böttger were employed by Augustus the Strong and worked at Dresden and Meissen in Saxony. A workshop note records that the first specimen of hard, white and vitrified European porcelain was produced in 1708. At the time, the research was still being supervised by Tschirnhaus, who died in October of that year. Böttger reported to Augustus in March 1709 that he could make porcelain. He usually gets the credit for the European discovery of porcelain.
The first important French soft-paste porcelain was made at the Saint-Cloud factory before 1702. Soft-paste factories were established at Chantilly in 1730 and at Mennecy in 1750. The Vincennes porcelain factory was established in 1740, and moved later to larger premises in Sèvres. in 1756. Vincennes soft-paste was whiter and more perfect than any of its French rivals, which put Vincennes/Sèvres porcelain in the leading position in France.
The first soft-paste in England was demonstrated by Thomas Briand to the Royal Society in 1742, and is believed to have been based on the Saint-Cloud formula. In 1749, Thomas Frye took out a patent on a porcelain containing bone ash. This was the first bone china, later perfected by Josiah Spode.
In the twenty-five years after Briand's demonstration, half a dozen factories were founded in England to make soft-paste table-wares and figures. Some famous factories were:
William Cookworthy discovered deposits of kaolin clay in Cornwall. This helped the development of porcelain and other whiteware ceramics in England. Cookworthy's factory at Plymouth, 1768, used kaolin clay and china stone. He made porcelain with a composition similar to the Chinese porcelains of the early 18th century.
Kiln
A kiln is a thermally insulated chamber or oven in which a controlled temperature regime is produced.
ChuChu
ChuChu is a comic magazine that is written for teenage girls. It is published by Syougakukan（Japan).
Mettā
Metta is a Buddhist term translated as loving kindness or friendliness.
Metta is wanting others to be happy.
The opposite is wanting others to be unhappy: anger, hatred.
Oxide
An oxide is a chemical compound containing at least one oxygen atom and at least one atom of one other element. Most of the Earth's crust consists of oxides (mainly silica). Oxides can be made when elements are oxidized by air (when oxygen in the air reacts with the element).
Some common oxides are:
Mew
Mew can be:
Proposal
A Proposal is when people suggest an idea. It is usually used when someone suggests an idea of marriage, when they ask the person they like to marry them.
Versailles, Yvelines
Versailles is a French city. It is in the western suburbs of Paris, 17.1 km. (10.6 miles) from the center of Paris. It is the "capital" of the Yvelines département. This city is very important for the History of France because it was formerly the capital of the kingdom of France.
Its name comes from the Latin word "vertere", meaning to turn the soil.
Versailles is made world-famous by the Palace of Versailles (Château de Versailles), where Louis XIV, Louis XV and Louis XVI lived.
In 2004, about 85,900 people lived here.
This is where the Treaty of Versailles was signed at the end of The Great War.
Major
Major is a rank that is given for a mid-level command officer (higher than the rank of Captain and lower than the rank of Lieutenant Colonel). In Canada, it is shown by a thick bar followed by a thin bar and again by a thick bar. In Great Britain it is represented by a single crown. In the United States, it is shown by a gold oak leaf. The pay grade for the rank of major is O-4.
Sibling
The siblings are the sisters and brothers of a person.
There are several different types of siblings.
Silicate
In chemistry, a silicate is a chemical compound consisting of one or more central silicon atoms that are surrounded by electronegative anions.
The most common silicate species consist of silicon with oxygen as the anion. Silicate anions, with a negative net electrical charge, must have that charge balanced by other cations to make an electrically neutral compound.
In geology and planetary science, the term silicate is used to denote types of rock that consist predominantly of silicate minerals.
On Earth, a wide variety of silicate minerals occur in an even wider range of combinations as a result of the processes that form and re-work the crust. These processes include partial melting, crystallization, fractionation, metamorphism, weathering and diagenesis. Living things also contribute to the silicate cycle near the Earth's surface. A type of plankton known as diatoms construct their exoskeletons, known as tests, from silica. The tests of dead diatoms are a major constituent of deep ocean sediment
Newton metre