Pliny the Elder mentioned glass mirrors in his encyclopedia Natural History. Yet during the dark Middle Ages, the technique for making transparent glass had been lost, and people could no longer produce clear glass.
But that did not stump the craftsmen. They found crystals of suitable size and polished them smooth and flat. Then they combined the smooth, flat metal with the crystal, creating the prototype of a glass mirror.
By the early thirteenth century, Italy's glass industry was highly developed, and Venice had become world-famous for producing glass. In the early fourteenth century, Venetian glassmakers added manganese dioxide while experimenting with colorless glass and succeeded in making it. From then on, Venice became famous for its abundance of mirrors.
To make a suitable telescope, Galileo improved the glassmaking process, replacing manganese dioxide with the ash of a certain plant. Manganese was a highly reactive metallic element. Although its oxides were stable, once heated, they could easily explode.
Even though a mirror sold for enough to buy three paintings by Raphael, customers still came in an endless stream.
Besides deriving from Old English words for memory, recollection, the state of being remembered, thought, the conscious mind, intellect, and intention; from the Proto-Germanic word for "thought"; and from the Old German for love and cherished memories, "mind" also had the root men-, which in Indo-European roots meant smallness and solitude.
Even Georgiana herself found it boring as hell when she listened to those old scholars explain it in such vague terms, let alone young people.
Whether it was Grindelwald or Dumbledore, both had "props" when they unfolded their "domains," such as a skull and the Deluminator.
Grindelwald's skull, however, had been destroyed by Leta Lestrange. Within the ring of fire he created, people followed his rules: those who sincerely followed him