Chuck Hamsher held the green bowl up to the light -- a black light -- and told me to watch.

“If it were dark in here, this would glow,” he said, but there was no way he was turning off the lights in his store, Purple Moon, in the middle of the day -- at least, not on a windy Saturday afternoon, when customers were blowing in like so many stray leaves.

I wanted to see this. I wanted to be wowed.

From my time hanging out at Blenko Glass in Milton, I’d learned that by adding different elements or weird chemical compounds, glass can be colored. Using a little bit of gold can turn clear glass ruby red. Sugar can make glass amber.

It was magic!

But uranium makes pale-yellow or green glass that glows in the dark.

This isn’t new.

Glassmakers have been using uranium to do this for centuries,

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