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The planes and angles of the Windows Gallery are the perfect setting for the story of the struggle for the seemingly simple window. They trace a path that leads from the distorted handmade panes of 100 years ago to the high-quality, mass-produced, energy-saving windows available today.
A window is simple—a flat piece of glass. But making that flat piece of glass was once anything but simple. Until the turn of the 20th century, a window started as a bubble on the end of a glassmaker's blowpipe.
How did the window evolve from an expensive luxury into an everyday item that we take for granted? Find out in the Windows Gallery. Meet the inventors who struggled to make windows that were bigger, flatter, and less distorted. Discover the ingenious methods they devised to make flat glass flat.
More and bigger windows mean more glass to break. In the Windows Gallery, learn what makes safety glass—used in windshields, glass doors, and building facades—safer. Test tempered glass for yourself and—if you dare—stand on a glass floor while you watch a video about how glass breaks.
Articles
The space shuttle has triple paned, optical-quality windows. Thirty-seven window panes in eleven different sizes and shapes are produced for each...
The mighty glowing columns that stand like pillars in a ghostly cathedral... -Anonymous At the beginning of the 20th...
Glass breaks. But if it’s strengthened by thermal tempering, it breaks less easily and more safely. By 1920, architects and European car designers...
Glass manufacturers had spent centuries learning how to make flat glass. Now, they wanted to bend it into complex shapes—without marring its surface...
Edouard Benedictus, a set and costume designer for a French theater, wanted to make glass safer. He was disturbed by reports of people being...
Both companies were chasing the same thing: the enormous market for flat glass. While Pilkington was working to develop flat glass, Corning Glass...
The auto and building industries boomed after World War II. Plate glass was in extremely short supply. Twin-grinding—used all over the world to make...
When you think of a window, you think of a flat piece of glass. But window glass didn’t always start out flat. It once began as a massive bubble on...
Glass windows are great, but they waste energy. A glass pane provides only slightly more insulation than nothing at all. Even so, builders were using...
