Crash! The Shiny Red Mug Revisited

When I received the Longaberger Travel Mugs, they were immediately taken over by my two children (of course); one for my daughter and one for my son.  They apparently liked them too!  One day my son was making a cup of hot tea in his red mug.  I was sitting in the adjacent room working at the computer.  Suddenly I heard this loud crash.  I knew perfectly well what had happened and couldn't believe that he had broken my new mug already.  Turning around I expected to see pieces of red pottery all over the kitchen floor.  What I saw took me a minute to digest.  Shards of pottery were in fact scattered over the floor, but they were not red.  I finally realized that the mug had landed on the cat's ceramic food dish and shattered it.  I went over to pick up the mug, expecting that the underside was broken, but the mug was completely intact.  There was a slight scratch (only discernible to a perfectionist like me!) where the sharp edge of one of the broken shards had nicked the glaze.

I couldn't believe what had just happened.  For years I have been frustrated because the dishes I have owned are constantly chipped or broken by my husband or the kids.  I hate feeling like I have to guard the dishes and remind people to be careful when they load the dishwasher.  In particular, we have some dishes that we got when we were married.  I really like them, except that the top of the bowls flare out in a thin lip at the top.  Well guess what kept happening to the edges of those bowls!  It really bothers me to set the table with what are supposed to be our good dishes only to have chips all over them.

The less expensive dinnerware that I had purchased in the meantime was even worse.  Every encounter with another dish in the dishwasher chipped off the glaze and exposed the porous clay beneath.  These dishes I had purchased for the design on them, which was now being chipped away.  Ditto for the gorgeous hand-painted Italian butter dish I had carefully brought back from a trip to Italy--that was so depressing.  That piece of pottery was NOT so inexpensive.

What was it that made the Longaberger pottery so strong and durable compared to my other dishes?  I had to find out what exactly "vitrified pottery" was.