When was automobile safety glass invented

Edouard Benedictus made an accidental discovery in his lab. One day, in he dropped a beaker sending the flask to the floor. It broke — but its pieces held together. Cellulose nitrate, a clear liquid plastic left in the beaker, had dried and kept the glass from breaking into shards.

After experimenting further Benedictus developed safety glass, and he hoped to promote its use in automobiles. Benedictus, in , added a gelatin layer which stuck to both panes of glass and patented Triplex. The Triplex Glass Company was founded. As more and more cars took to the roads, a rise in accidents was inevitable. When one of these early cars was involved in an accident, it was not uncommon for the driver at a minimum to be injured by flying shards of glass or, far worse, lose his life after going headfirst through the windshield.

There are stories that Henry Ford and some of his closest friends were injured by flying glass in accidents. Ford was convinced it was time to make car windshields safer and decided to produce improved glass. Trouble came to automotive glass when in December the Federation of Flat Glass Workers demanded more pay and a closed union shop. When their demands were not met, roughly 13, strikers brought plate glass manufacturing to its knees. Ford prepared to make the glass it needed to continue production and GM reported they had a month's supply.

Nonetheless, before the strike was settled in part due to Walter Chrysler's intervention there had been thousands of lay offs in Ford and Pierce-Arrow plants. With the strike settled and production resumed, in the use of safety glass was finally mandated for all car models. In Libbey-Owens-Ford was advertising a new safety plate glass that was stronger, safer, and more flexible. Then standard equipment on many models, it was said to have no distortion and to be "safer because it's laminated — clearer because it's plate".

That ad also relied on what now might appear as shaky science. It claimed that Dr. Hey, who would argue with those figures? In Pittsburgh Plate Glass came out with Herculite, tempered glass that was considerably more shatter resistant than plate glass.

Tempered glass is made by placing glass into an atmospheric oven which heats and hardens it. Rapidly cooled after its formation, it develops an even tougher outer skin. Its strength exceeds that of regular glass by five to ten times. Nonetheless it retains its flexibility and can be cut and formed into many shapes.

It can withstand great force and if it is broken it breaks into relatively small smooth cubical pebbles.

Besides all those positive attributes, it is thinner than laminated glass and considerably cheaper to fabricate. The forties brought even further progress for automotive windshields. In Studebaker introduced its Starlight coupe with a curved windshield. Far more striking, the avant garde Tucker automobile came with "Pop-Out" windshields. Libbey-Owens-Ford manufactured them. A Tucker sales brochure explained that the "laminated safety glass [was] mounted in sponge rubber fastening so that a hard blow from within will eject it in one piece.

From to safety glass was used in all save the rear window of cars. In the late s, though, car manufacturers were looking for a cheaper option and began using tempered glass for side and rear windows.

Besides saving on cost, tempered glass made it easier for rescuers to cut into a vehicle to free trapped passengers. Some argue, however, that tempered glass should not be used on side windows since tempered glass windows will not prevent partial ejection in side collisions or rollovers.

Another disadvantage with tempered glass is that it cannot be repaired as laminated glass can. There were also styling innovations in the fifties. GM's LeSabre boasted the first wraparound, panoramic windshield designed to reduce the driver's blind spot. Its limited edition Cadillac Eldorado also offered the wraparound windshield. By most cars had curved windshields — at the top and bottom and also at the sides. With curved side windows automotive stylists could add more interior room and they could produce a smoother body line.

Engineers developed techniques to drill holes in side windows for anchoring mechanisms resulting in further safety improvements. As the amount of glass increased, drivers were aware of less privacy and greater solar buildup, so tinted windshields were made available. Glass manufacturers added iron oxide to glass giving it a blue or blue-green color.

They could also add a darker band of color at the top of the windshield by applying a dye to the PVB inner layer. Each state regulates how much tint can be applied to windows. Glass production suddenly became cheaper in with the Pilkington development of the float process which significantly improved both quality and clarity of glass.

Since auto safety glass is designed to shatter into safe particles when it is broken, this miraculous material can help save lives and prevent injury. When you bring your car in for windshield chip repair at a shop specializing in auto glass serving Phoenix, your technician will use specialized techniques to repair the different layers of your safety glass.

Automotive safety glass can trace its history back to , when a French chemist named Edouard Benedictus was working with glass flasks in his laboratory. Benedictus had placed a transparent coating into one of the flasks that he was using for his experiment. In a stroke of fate, Benedictus happened to knock the flask off of his work station, thus accidentally discovering safety glass.