The Past And Present Of Tempered Glass

Compared with ordinary glass, tempered glass has the characteristics of safety and high strength. Human has discovered, produced and used tempered glass for more than 300 years.

The development of tempered glass can be traced back to the middle of the 17th century. A king of the Rhine named Robert once did an interesting experiment. He put a drop of molten glass in ice-cold water and made a kind of very hard glass. This kind of high-strength granular glass is like a drop of water, with a long and curved tail, called "Prince Robert Pellet". But when the tail of the small grain is bent and broken, it is strange that the whole small grain collapses suddenly and even becomes a fine powder. The above method is very similar to the quenching of metal, and this is the quenching of glass. This kind of quenching does not cause any change in the composition of the glass, so it is also called physical tempered, so tempered glass is called toughened glass, also called armoured glass.

The first patent for glass tempering was obtained by the French in 1874. The tempering method is to heat the glass to a temperature close to the softening temperature and immediately put it into a relatively low temperature liquid tank to increase the surface stress. This method is the early liquid tempering method. Frederick Siemens of Germany obtained a patent in 1875, and Geovge E. Rogens of Massachusetts, USA applied the tempering method to glass wine glasses and lamp posts in 1876. In the same year, Hugh O’heill of New Jersey obtained a patent.

In the 1930s, Saint-Gobain in France, Triplux in the United States, and Pilkington in the United Kingdom began to produce large-area flat tempered glass for windshield. Japan also successively carried out the industrial production of toughened glass in the 1930s. From then on, the world began the era of mass production of tempered glass.

After 1970, Triplex in the United Kingdom succeeded in tempering glass with a thickness of 0.75 to 1.5 mm with a liquid medium, ending the history of physical tempering that could not temper thin glass. This is a major breakthrough in tempered glass technology.

Since the 1970s, tempered glass technology has been comprehensively promoted and popularized worldwide. Tempered glass has been used in the fields of automobiles, construction, aviation, electronics, etc., especially in the fields of construction and automobiles, and it is widely used in sight glasses and gauge glasses application.