Glass treating

Polishing and glazing

Etching of most silicate glasses can be carried out using a solution of 6–30 percent hydrofluoric acid with a small amount of sulfuric acid—although, for safety reasons, this treatment is not recommended. Strengthening by overlay glazing is carried out by firing onto the glass product a thin layer of another glass that has lower thermal expansion properties than the substrate.

Thermal tempering

Thermal tempering is achieved by quenching (or rapid-cooling) the glass from a temperature well above the transition range using symmetrically placed air jets. Since the outer layers of the glass are cooled faster than the inside and pass through the glass transition range sooner, they shrink at a higher rate and are compressed (in effect strengthening the glass), while the interior is stretched. Many commercial glass products can be strengthened significantly by thermal tempering. However, thick glasses may fracture spontaneously, beginning at a flaw in the interior, owing to the high tension that tempering creates in that region. Such glass may break, or dice, violently into a larger number of pieces. Since diced glass is unlikely to cause serious injury, tempered glass products may be legally required in certain applications, as in bathroom shower doors.

Ion exchange

Ion-exchange strengthening is applicable only to alkali-containing glasses. It is carried out by immersing the glass in a bath of molten alkali salt (generally a nitrate) at temperatures below the transition range. The salt must be selected to have ions greater in size than the host alkali ions in glass. Through a diffusion mechanism, the larger invading ions from the alkali bath exchange relatively smaller sites with the smaller alkali ions in the surface regions of the glass—thus producing, as in thermal tempering, compression in the surface and tension in the interior. Because the invading ions penetrate only 40 to 300 micrometres into the host glass, the magnitude of the balancing internal tension is generally small. Thin glass specimens may be strengthened using the ion-exchange process. However, it is a slow process, generally requiring 2 to 24 hours of immersion in the salt bath.

Lamination

In lamination, the mechanical energy associated with applied stress is absorbed by successive layers of glass and laminate, leaving less energy for crack development. Most glass products are laminated by bonding sheets of tough polymers such as polyvinyl butyral, polyurethane, ethylene terpolymer, and polytetrafluoroethane (sold under the trademark Teflon) to glass surfaces, generally by heat-shrinking. For windshield applications, paired sheets of glass, 3 to 6 millimetres (0.12 to 0.5 inch) thick, with a fine coating of talc to keep them from fusing, are placed over a metal support frame. The two plies are heated almost to softening, at which point bending occurs basically by gravity action. After cooling, the plies are separated and a polymer interlayer introduced, and the entire laminated assembly is gently heated in an electric furnace and either squeezed through a pair of rollers or pressed between molds. Not only does the interlayer help to absorb the energy of an impacting object, but the adhesion of glass to the polymer minimizes the risk of flying shards upon fracture. For aircraft, windshields may have several laminates, sometimes as many as three glass plies and two plastic interlayers. At least one of the inner glass plies is strengthened by ion exchange (see above) in order to withstand the impact of flying objects such as birds. Bulletproof glass is often laminated, although a single ply of dead-annealed glass as thick as 20 to 25 millimetres is used in some applications. The reason for having dead-annealed glass is the absence of tension in the interior; internal tension would cause the glass to shatter upon impact of the first bullet, thereby rendering the person behind the glass vulnerable to the second bullet.

The ancient world

Glass as an independent object (mostly as beads) dates back to about 2500 bc. It originated perhaps in Mesopotamia and was brought later to Egypt. Vessels of glass appeared about 1450 bc, during the reign of Thutmose III, a pharaoh of the 18th dynasty of Egypt. A glass bottle bearing Thutmose’s hieroglyph is in the British Museum in London. From Mesopotamia and Egypt, glassmaking using the basic soda-lime-silica composition traveled to Phoenicia, along the coast of present-day Lebanon. From there the art spread to Cyprus, Greece, and, by the 9th century bc, the Italian peninsula. After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the 4th century bc, glassmaking skills spread to the East, including the Indian subcontinent. Glass beads and bangles characteristic of the Hindu culture of about 200 bc have been discovered in Nevasa excavations. Glassmakers in Syria prospered during this time, specializing in plain bowls of single colours.

In Alexandria about 100 bc the millefiori (“thousand flowers”) process for making open beakers and shallow dishes was developed. In this process a shaped core was made, perhaps of mud, to which sections of coloured glass canes were attached. The core and canes were placed into an outer mold to keep the shape while the glass fused in an oven. After removing the mold and core, the glass surfaces were ground smooth. Cross sections of the coloured rods showed a striking mosaic effect.

Near the beginning of the Christian era, the Phoenicians learned how to blow glass with a blowing iron. The blowing iron was an iron tube about 1.5 metres (5 feet) long, with a mouthpiece at one end and a knob for holding soft glass at the other end. A blob of molten glass was collected on the knob end and rolled into a suitable shape on a flat surface of iron or stone called the marver. The shape could then be blown inside a mold or freely in air with occasional reheating. A solid iron rod called the pontil was used to wrap, twirl, or pinch glass into desired complexities. Handle, stem, or bottom also could be fused to the vessel when desired.

The Romans and Egyptians probably used sand mixed with ground seashells as raw materials for silica and lime and hardwood ash as the source of soda. They also showed astonishing skill in the way they used metallic oxides as colorizers. Very small differences in oxide content can drastically affect the final colour of a glass; yet colours and tints were reproduced time and again with remarkable consistency. Copper was used to make green and ruby-red glass; iron produced black, brown, and green; antimony, yellow; manganese was employed to make purple and amethyst glass. An opaque white glass, made by using tin, was important in glass cameo work, of which the famous Portland vase, made in 1st-century Rome, is an outstanding example. To make this vase, a layer of white glass was superimposed on a darker material and afterward sculpted, pierced, and cut away to leave the white figures in relief against the darker background.

Roman attempts to make flat glass by pouring slabs about 12 millimetres (1/2 inch) thick were unrewarding. Proper transparency could not be achieved by such means without grinding and polishing the cast material; the lack of transparency and the difficulty encountered in making any but small panes by this method led to the introduction of stained-glass windows, first used in the Eastern Roman Empire in the early 12th century.

The Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Glassmaking skills in Europe declined after ad 200; for about a thousand years, standards remained far below those of the Romans. The range of articles, as well as the quality of the material, was poor; the glass was of inferior colour and marred by streaks and bubbles. The stained-glass windows that began to appear in the new Gothic churches in Europe in the 12th century reached their full splendour in the 13th and 14th centuries. Many of the colours were produced by the method of fusing stains to the surface of the glass. Clear, colourless glass proved extremely difficult to achieve, however.

The real revival of glassmaking skills in Europe came by way of Venice through contact with the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium). The Venetians made discoveries and innovations of their own, learning, for example, to eliminate all accidental colorizers from a glass melt by adding pyrolusite, a manganese mineral known as glassmaker’s soap. The natural result was a gray glass, the overall transparency of which was even less than that of the otherwise slightly tinted glass. However, so long as the amounts of the original colorizer and of its antidote were small and the thickness of the finished article was slight, the loss of transparency was less noticeable than the unwanted colour would have been.

The Venetians eventually redeveloped all the skills of the Romans. Their products and their secrets were so much sought after that regulations were passed forbidding the emigration of workers. The glassworks, said to be more than a kilometre long, was moved in its entirety to the island of Murano in 1291 because of the fires it had caused. Most of the glass produced was soda-lime glass. Satisfactory for most purposes because it was very stable chemically and of reasonable hardness, soda-lime glass was also easily made. Its moderate softening temperature made it very workable, and it could be readily resoftened a number of times if necessary to complete an article. Above all, the materials needed for its manufacture were plentiful: sand and limestone were ubiquitous, and soda ash was readily obtainable from the hardwood forests that also provided fuel for the furnaces. Desirable but scarcer materials included potash, produced by burning seaweed and favoured by the Venetians above soda ash, and calcined and crushed river pebbles (selected for their whiteness), which most Italian glassmakers preferred to common sand.

By the 15th century, Venetians had learned to make a fine rock crystal known as Venetian cristallo. Beautiful coloured glasses and techniques for decoration, such as gilding, also were developed. The Venetian product was exported to all over Europe and the Byzantine Empire. After Constantinople was captured by the Turks in 1453, however, the Venetian glass trade fell. Glassmakers emigrated from Venice and helped other Europeans set up their glass houses (see Figure 13). Germans and Bohemians concentrated on the preparation and selection of newer, purer raw materials. Glass quality improved by the addition of low-iron potash and purer quartz. By 1680, Bohemian “crystal”—basically a potash-lime glass—was developed. In 1674 George Ravenscroft of London experimented with “flint” glass, a lead-crystal composition made with a large proportion of calcined flints and potash. By using 15 percent lead oxide, quartz pebbles imported from the Po River in Italy, and purer potash, he produced a fine, lustrous glass, soft enough to be cut and engraved easily and of greater refractive power than the common soda-lime glass. By the end of the century, there were 11 houses in London producing leaded crystal. During the same period, Johann Kunckel in Germany developed a reliable formula for producing ruby-red glass using gold chloride. Gold was dissolved in aqua regia and mixed with the batch, which was then melted, formed, and subsequently reheated to “strike” the precipitation of the ruby-red colour. Kunckel also developed a phosphate opal glass, also called porcelain glass or Milchglas, by adding burned bone or horn to the soda-lime batch.

Science in glassmaking

The chemical revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries brought greater understanding of the principles of glassmaking. In 1807 John Dalton’s atomic theory was published. The development of systematic quantitative chemical analysis in 1808 by Jöns Jacob Berzelius, followed by chemical formulas and chemical equations, contributed a great deal to the establishment of large-scale industrial supply of purified raw materials. For instance, the Solvay process for producing soda ash was set up in 1863 in Belgium. In addition, the development of a concise chemical terminology removed much of the ambiguity and confusion characteristic of previous work. It was the French chemist Jean-Baptiste-André Dumas who showed in 1830 that the durability of soda-lime-silica glass was maximized when the ratio of the three was 1:1:6; this is essentially the modern soda-lime-silica composition.

In 1932 W.H. Zachariasen published The Atomic Arrangement in Glass, a classic paper that had perhaps the most influence of any published work on glass science. Zachariasen’s work placed the understanding of glass structure and its relationship to composition on its modern footing. The principles of his atomic structure theory are outlined in the section on Glass formation.

Glass melting

Throughout the development of early glass, the crucible material was natural clay. Ancient Egyptian crucibles from about 1370 bc measured only a few centimetres deep and had large amounts of alkali and magnesia and 6 to 8 percent iron oxide. Such a crucible could hardly withstand modern melting temperatures of 1,100° C (2,000° F) and higher, and most likely they contaminated the glass with iron. The discovery of the blowing iron brought in the development of pot furnaces, which have remained almost unchanged even to this day. The pot furnaces were made of a plastic mixture of raw clay mixed well to remove bubbles. The pot floor was made first, before the sidewalls and the cover with a side opening were added.

Compartmentalized furnaces were developed by the 9th and 10th centuries. In these furnaces wood fires burned within a lower compartment, directly beneath a compartment where a glass melting pot was placed. The formed product was left to cool slowly in yet a third compartment located above or to the side. Many of the early designs failed to recognize the need for air drafts. During the late 17th century, cone-shaped, or “English,” glass furnaces using coal as fuel appeared. The cones rose as high as 35 metres and were 10 to 12 metres in diameter. In these furnaces, covered pots for glass melting were placed on a middle level slightly below the ground, and an underground tunnel brought in high-velocity upward air drafts. Significantly higher temperatures could be attained with such a design.

In the mid-19th century, with the understanding of the first law of thermodynamics (namely, the equivalence of work and heat), procedures for heat regeneration were established. As pioneered by the brothers Friedrich and William Siemens, working with the Chance brothers in England about 1860, regenerator-equipped pot furnaces consumed only about one-tenth of the fuel of the old furnaces. It was in 1867 that Friedrich Siemens, working in his late brother Hans’ factory in Dresden, Ger., successfully converted a day tank to a continuous cross-fired furnace equipped with regenerators. The tank was 7.5 metres by 2.3 metres, with a glass depth of 50 centimetres (20 inches). The furnace had three chambers—melting, refining, and working—separated by dividing walls. A need to obtain higher resistance to chemical attack by molten glass was recognized: clays of a high alumina-to-silica ratio, with minimal impurities, were recommended for areas of glass contact as well as the furnace crown. Seventy-five years later, in 1942, electric-arc fusion-cast refractories became commercially available—particularly the ZAC refractory (35 percent zirconia, 53 percent alumina, and 12 percent silica) developed by Gordon Fulcher at Corning Glass Works in New York. These refractories displayed extremely high resistance to corrosion during continuous contact with glass at elevated temperatures and paved the way to the current technology.

Container making

Although glass containers for wine and beer are probably 1,600 years old, much of their use began only in the late 17th century. In the United States, large-scale production of bottles was pioneered by Caspar Wistar in 1739 at his New Jersey plant. In the 1770s the carbonation process for producing soft drinks was developed, and so began an entirely new bottling industry. At the Great Exhibition of 1851 in the Crystal Palace in London, one million “pop” bottles were consumed. The first beer pasteurized in glass was produced in Copenhagen in 1870. Pasteurization of milk followed soon after.

The molding of a screw thread on a container was invented by John Mason in 1858. The principles of the “press-and-blow” process for making wide-mouth jars were shown in the United States by Philip Arbogast in 1882, and the “blow-and-blow” process for making narrow-neck containers was demonstrated by Howard Ashley in England in 1885. These processes employed manual delivery; fully automatic jar forming by a suction-and-blow process was perfected by Michael Owens over the period 1895–1917 at the Toledo (Ohio) Glass Company, which subsequently became the Owens Bottle Machine Company. The automatic single-gob feeder was developed in 1919–22 by Karl Peiler at the Hartford-Fairmont Company in Connecticut. Fully automatic machines followed, but the true rugged survivor, utilizing fully automatic gob delivery to the maximum versatility, was the Individual Section, or IS, machine invented by Henry Ingle at the Hartford Empire Company in 1925.

Flat glass

The Romans were perhaps the first to develop flat glass for use as windows: a bathhouse window of greenish blue colour, most likely obtained by casting, was discovered in the ruins of Pompeii. In the Middle Ages the crown process for making window glass was developed by the Normans. A mass of glass was gathered and blown into a globe at the end of the blowing iron and marvered to a conical shape. A pontil rod was attached to the other end, and the blowing iron was cracked off, leaving a jagged opening. The glassmaker then took the globe into the “glory hole” (the mouth) of the furnace, reheating it and at the same time spinning it to keep it from sagging. At some point, centrifugal force caused the globe to flash into a flat disk, which grew larger with continued spinning. Upon cooling, the disk was cracked off the pontil rod. Such glass was not truly flat. The disk was very uneven, being thickest near the centre and marked by concentric circular waves; at the very middle was the fractured nub, or crown, marking the point of former attachment to the pontil. Disks more than about 1.5 metres in diameter were hardly practical.

Most medieval church windows were made from broad glass. In this process, which continued to be practiced with variations into the 20th century, a large cylinder, as much as 50 centimetres in diameter and 175 centimetres long, was made by repeated gathering, blowing, and swinging. The cylinder was slit when cold and gradually opened with moderate reheating to become flat (see Figure 13). Glass made from this process was flatter than crown glass and did not have the telltale crown in the middle; moreover, it could be made in much larger pieces. The use of compressed air in the early 1900s allowed the cylinders to be blown as large as 75 centimetres in diameter and up to 9 metres in length.

Despite its advantages over crown glass, broad glass had surface waviness and variations in thickness. For a higher degree of flatness, glass had to be cast (generally on a steel table) and rolled. The cast plates were subsequently ground and polished. In the Bicheroux process, introduced in Germany in the 1920s, about a ton of glass was melted in a pot and carried to the table, where it was poured through a pair of rollers. Rolling the sheet reduced the amount of grinding needed for flatness.

Two continuous flat-glass machines were introduced about the turn of the 20th century: the updraw machine, designed by Émile Fourcault of Belgium; and the Irving Colburn machine, developed at the Libbey-Owens Glass Company in Charleston, W.Va., U.S. In the Fourcault process, a one- to two-metre-wide steel mesh bait was introduced into molten glass at the working end of the furnace. The cooled glass adhered to the bait and was pulled upward between water-cooled tubes that solidified the sheet edges. The sheet was then gripped at the edges by nonchilling asbestos rollers and pulled farther up the draw tower. The Colburn machine borrowed its design from the papermaking process. The sheet was drawn vertically from the glass surface, but, after rising only a few metres, it was gradually bent over a polished nickel-alloy roller to become horizontal, ultimately traveling into the annealing lehr.

In both the Fourcault and the Colburn processes, glass was marked with undulations caused by the pulling and rolling gear. In addition, the glass sheets, like all flat glasses produced by earlier processes, had to be ground and polished for optical clarity. The development of the twin grinding and polishing machine in 1935 at the Pilkington Brothers works in Doncaster, Eng., made it possible for plate to be made by horizontal flow through a double-roller process and then ground and polished on-line. Finally, it took seven years of intense development before Alastair Pilkington introduced in 1959 the float glass process, which altogether eliminated the need for grinding and polishing. (The float process is described in Glass forming: Flat glass.) A further development, the electro-float process, introduced in 1967, made it possible to implant copper and other metal ions into the upper surface of glass using tin as an electrode at the bottom and a fixed copper (or other metal) electrode halfway down the bath at the top.

Optical glass

Until the mid-19th century, optical glass of reliable quality was rare. Beginning in the 1850s, however, the Chance Brothers factory in England successfully produced a variety of optical glasses using a melt-stirring process. Indeed, one of the highlights of the Great Exhibition of 1851 was a disk of very homogeneous dense flint, 29 inches in diameter and 2.25 inches thick, made by Chance Brothers. Work on optical glass had also been started by Carl Zeiss at Jena, Ger., in 1846. Beginning in the 1880s, the pooled cooperation of Zeiss (an instrument maker), Ernst Abbe (a physicist), and Otto Schott (a chemist) brought miracles to the optical glass industry. The Jena Glass Works became the dominant supplier of glass blanks for eyeglasses, microscopes, binoculars, cameras, and telescopes. Still, glass blanks had to be ground and polished to a lens prescription.

During World War I, with supply from Germany cut off, optical glass suddenly became a strategic material. Allied governments funded the expansion of optical glassmaking facilities at Chance Brothers in England and at Bausch & Lomb in the United States. Subsequently, the principles of permanent stress generation and of fine annealing of optical glass were established. In 1934, at the Corning Glass Works in New York, a 200-inch-diameter borosilicate glass mirror for the Hale Telescope at the Palomar Observatory was cast and annealed over eight months, cooling at a rate of approximately 1° F per day. After the end of World War II, a continuous electric melting process for optical glass was developed in which the tank was platinum-lined and the glass was vigorously stirred in the fining chamber. Finished lenses can now be made by direct molding, without grinding and polishing.