Richard LaMotte grew up in southeastern Virginia and has made frequent trips to the Outer Banks of North Carolina over four decades. He currently resides on Maryland’s Eastern Shore where his wife, Nancy, started a sea-glass jewelry business using shards from the nearby Chesapeake Bay. While researching glass history for a lecture in 2002, he began to pursue answers to questions posed by his wife’s customers. This led to more extensive research into glass colors, as well as the physics and chemistry behind the glass forms found in a shoreline environment. Since 1984, Richard has worked for a water analysis company with products that rely heavily on detailed color matching and has written two consumer handbooks on water testing. In his spare time, he has spent hours on the Chesapeake carefully studying close to 30,000 shards of sea glass to produce this in-depth study.