Flexible Glass

Newscameramen in Toledo last week busily snapped pictures of smiling young ladies assuming graceful poses on a swing, a springboard, a seesaw. One view showed the swing's platform sagging under the weight of three girls. In another a seesaw was seen bending under the weight of a girl at each end. Another showed a girl poised near the tip of a bending springboard. The equipment came in for more attention than the posers because platform, seesaw and springboard were all made of glass. This flexible, resilient glass, called "tempered glass'' by its U. S. manufacturer, Libbey-Owens-Ford Glass Co., is about five times stronger than plate glass, can be bent or twisted 20DEG out of its plane, is unharmed by sudden temperature shifts, and when finally shattered by a severe impact does not fly into jagged slivers but crumbles harmlessly into small bits.

Like two other new materials introduced recently--Nitramon. du Pont's "foolproof" explosive (TIME, Feb. 4), and Solene, a solidified gasoline developed at New York University (TIME. July 15) -- tempered glass lends itself to spectacular demonstrations. Last week it was unharmed after a 2-lb. steel ball and a11-lb. bag of steel shot had been dropped on it from six feet, after a pane of it had been placed on an ice cake and molten lead poured on the top surface, after a torsion machine had warped a sheet of it like so much cardboard.

Tempered glass is made from ordinary plate glass, which is first heated close to the melting point in an electric furnace, then abruptly chilled by blasts of air. The surface, cooling and contracting faster than the inside, becomes a stretched, flexible skin and the inside retains some elasticity because of compression by the skin. Libbey-Owens-Ford has installed under license the special electric furnaces in which tempered glass was first made in Europe. The glass must be cut to size before furnace treatment because after tempering it is crumbled by cutting tools. It can be finished in various colors whose brilliancy is enhanced by fire-glazing. Suggested uses: all-glass, illuminated gasoline pumps; portholes in ships, kitchen stoves and industrial furnaces; shelves, fire screens, diving-bells; backstops for basketball nets.

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