The mighty glowing columns that stand like pillars in a ghostly cathedral...     -Anonymous At the beginning of the 20th century, there was no way to mass-produce flat glass. Although glass cylinders could be drawn by machine, they had to be opened and flattened by hand. What was needed was a way

The space shuttle has triple paned, optical-quality windows. Thirty-seven window panes in eleven different sizes and shapes are produced for each Orbiter. The %%fused%% %%silica%% outer panes of the forward windshields are designed to withstand high atmosphere reentry temperatures. The inner,

Otto Schott, the pioneering German glass chemist, made a glass that could reliably do something that didn’t seem possible: endure sudden, uneven temperature shifts without shattering. The key, Schott discovered in 1882, was to have a critical amount of the element boron in the glass recipe. Schott

"If necessity is the mother of invention, then for the glass fiber industry, adversity is the father."     -William Boeschenstein, Owens-Corning Fiberglas, 1995 The world’s largest bottle plant stood empty. Prohibition and the Depression had crushed the demand for bottles. American bottle

Hear from Scott Kardel, the public affairs coordinator for the Palomar Observatory, a world-class center for astronomical research that is owned and operated by the California Institute of Technology. There are five telescopes used at Palomar, including the 200-inch Hale Telescope (the "Big

Introduced in 1979, low emissivity (low-e) glass uses an ultra thin metallic coating on or in the glass to reflect the sun's rays. Commercial and residential buildings use low-e glass windows to help save energy. The powerful infrared light in sunlight heats up objects such as floors and