Science: Glass Goes to War

Glass is now going to war in a big way as a replacement for copper, aluminum, bronze, other scarce metals. Already centrifugal pumps with impellers, plates and other parts of glass are whirring. U.S. laundresses will shortly wield electric irons having glass sole plates. Glass plumbing for private homes may be around the corner. Industrial glass plumbing is already here to stay. Recent developments include easy-to-use glass-welding gadgets so simple that ordinary maintenance employes in the U.S. food industry can be trained to repair and even to install glass plumbing. The U.S. fisherman who uses cork or aluminum floats for his nets is about to switch to U.S. floats of pressed glass or Foamglas.

Foamglas, developed by Pittsburgh Corning Corp., is utterly unlike ordinary glass. It not only floats but is black in color, opaque, weighs about one-fifteenth as much as ordinary glass and can easily be sawed, drilled or shaped without chipping or shattering. To make it, glass is finely crushed and heated with carbon dust in a furnace. The molten mass rises and swells like dough as gas from the carbon froths up the melting glass into a foam which later cools and hardens while still keeping its foam structure. Waterproof, ratproof, rotproof, heat-resistant—Foamglas is finding its first big industrial use as a replacement for the cork linings of refrigerators. Today the industrial use of glass is making strides comparable to those of aluminum in the past decade, but it is challenged by plastics. The venerable U.S. glass industry, according to George Pope MacNichol Jr., vice president of Libbey-Owens-Ford, is at a historic crossroads: it can either partially abdicate before the plastics industry, try to develop glass products superior to plastics, or jump into the manufacture of plastics itself. Libbey-Owens-Ford has jumped into plastics, but predicts that it will be a long time, if ever, before a plastic can be made which will advantageously equal the scratch-resistant surface of flat industrial glass or plate glass.*

Libbey-Owens-Ford went into plastics to manufacture the plastic sandwich-filler used between pieces of plate glass to make shatterproof automobile and airplane windshields. Recently Du Pont, pioneer of plastics, announced that it had put its sandwich filler to completely new uses.

* Ordinary clear plastics have a “scratch resistance” about 500 times less than plate glass,but a new Pittsburgh plastic “C.R.39” is claimedto have a resistance of only ten to 30 times lessthan plate glass.