Pottery

Pottery is the ceramic ware made by potters. In everyday usage the term is taken to encompass a wide range of ceramics, including earthenware, stoneware, and porcelain. The places where such wares are made are called potteries.

Pottery is made by forming a clay body into objects of a required shape and heating them to high temperatures in a kiln to induce reactions that lead to permanent changes, including increasing their strength and hardening and setting their shape. There are wide regional variations in the properties of clays used by potters and this often helps to produce wares that are unique in character to a locality. It is common for clays and other minerals to be mixed to produce clay bodies suited to specific purposes; for example, a clay body that remains slightly porous after firing is often used for making earthenware or terra cotta flower-pots.

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Porcelain is a ceramic material made by heating selected and refined materials, often including clay in the form of kaolinite, to high temperatures. The raw materials for porcelain, when mixed with water, form a plastic body that can be worked to a required shape before firing in a kiln at temperatures between 1200�C and 1400�C. The toughness, strength, and translucence of porcelain arise mainly from the formation at high temperatures of glass and the mineral mullite within the fired body.

Porcelain was named after its resemblance to the white, shiny cowry, called in old Italian porcella (little pig), because the curved shape of its upper surface resembles the curve of a pig's back. Properties associated with porcelain include low permeability, high strength, hardness, glassiness, high durability, whiteness, translucence, resonance, brittleness, high resistance to the passage of electricity, high resistance to chemical attack, high resistance to thermal shock and high elasticity.

For the purposes of trade, the Combined Nomenclature of the European Communities defines porcelain as being "completely vitrified, hard, impermeable (even before glazing), white or artificially coloured, translucent (except when of considerable thickness) and resonant." However, the term porcelain lacks a universally agreed definition and has "been applied in a very unsystematic fashion to substances of diverse kinds which have only certain surface-qualities in common" (Burton 1906).

Porcelain is used to make table, kitchen, sanitary and decorative wares, objects of fine art and tiles. Its high resistance to the passage of electricity makes porcelain an excellent insulating material and it is widely used for high-voltage insulators. It is also used in dentistry to make false teeth, caps and crowns.

Bone china is a type of porcelain body first developed in Britain in which calcined ox bone (bone ash) is a major constituent. It is characterised by high whiteness, translucency and strength. Production usually involves a two stage firing where the first, bisque, is without a glaze at 1280 C (2336 F), which gives a translucent product and then glaze, or glost, fired at a lower temperature below 1080 C (1976 F).

English manufacturers were keen to produce porcelain of the quality to be found in Chinese imports, but they had to go down a different route. The first use of bone ash in ceramics is attributed to Thomas Frye in 1748 to make a type of soft-paste porcelain, at his Bow China Works. In the late 18th century, Josiah Spode undertook further developments, and subsequently popularised it, by mixing it with kaolin and China stone to compete with the imported Oriental porcelain.

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