One of the most striking contributions of glass-blowing to research (see Nature 517, 542–546; 2015) is the creation of 11,146 hemispherical photomultipliers in the neutrino detector used by Nobel laureate Masatoshi Koshiba. Their 50-centimetre diameters are a phenomenal achievement that called for great skill, strength and exceptional lung capacity.

Koshiba was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2002 for the detection of cosmic neutrinos at the Kamioka Observatory in Hida, Japan. He acknowledged the glass-blowers of the Hamamatsu Photonics firm in his Nobel lecture, saying that the 50-cm-diameter photomultipliers “were the essential ingredient of the Kamioka experiments”.