Glass, an ubiquitous material

Glasses play a fundamental role in our daily lives at the economic, cultural, societal, energy and geological levels. Geological glasses testify to igneous activity of the Earth and represent an important material for tools and ornamental objects from the Paleolithic to the present day. Glasses are also used to manufacture technical materials, such as containers (dishes, glasses, jars, bottles ...), screens (television, computer, smartphone ...), fibers with multiple applications (reinforcement, information, transport, energy, health ...), to ensure the storage of domestic or nuclear waste and, more recently, biomaterials (dental or bone implants ...). Thus, silica-based glasses are at the heart of the history of the Earth and humanity. The variation in composition of natural and industrial glasses is vast but its structure is generally based on a tetrahedral frame of $\mathrm{SiO}_{4}$ units, the backbone of more than 90% of the glasses that surround us in our daily lives. Around this silica frame, other chemical elements are well constrained to form to form a single unit structure for use as network modifying elements, charge compensator, dyes, volatiles, and other substances. This article is a short introduction on glass