Here’s the information on our order form

Today this glass is made by Corning using a fusion-draw process  in Harrodsburg, Ky., and is an alumino-silicate glass, not the everyday soda-lime glass.  In the fusion-draw process hot glass is pumped into a suspended trough and allowed it to overflow and run down either side. The glass flows then meet under the trough and fuse seamlessly into a smooth, hanging sheet of glass.  Fusion-draw glass is tempered in a chemical bath, and does not use heat-tempering as many sheet glasses do.  The resulting liquid-crystal glass can be made very thin and is very strong.  More than 100-plus handheld devices use this glass.

Gorilla Glass LCD television screens will be available from some manufacturers this year.  Sony showed Bravia  model televisions with these screens at the 2011 Consumer Electronic Show in January.  With production going full-tilt in Harrodsburg, Ky., Corning  is converting part of a second factory in Shizuoka, Japan, to fill the growing orders.

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/365265/november-10-2010/america-s-job-loss—beri-fox

A big “Thank You!” to our many friends in the glass manufacturing industry community who help us keep the Glass Factory Directory of North America up-to-date!

More than 15 years ago our office got a call from a float glass customer, who asked us why non-U.S. manufacturers could immediately deliver glass to him when he ordered it, while U.S. manufacturers would schedule a delivery in 1-2 months.  As I told him then, the non-U.S. manufacturers had boatloads of glass sitting offshore, waiting to find customers to whom they would sell and deliver the glass, while the U.S. manufacturers were working on the traditional manufacturing scheduling system which produced glass to fill orders.  The glass sitting on shipping vessels offshore had been manufactured in plants which were subsidized by their governments, and those plants were making glass whether or not the company had orders for it.

As the GlassGlobal article points out, the glass industry in the U.S. cannot grow because glass imports are competing for customers and many of the glass plants which used to be available are gone.  We get calls in our office every few months from someone who wants to build a glass plant in another country by buying and shipping overseas a closed glass glass plant in the U.S.

Many of the U.S. glass plants which are are still operating are not at full capacity.   According to GlassGlobal, the Carleton, Michigan plant which will produce the glass for the new World Trade Center buildings is operating at 85% capacity.

Several glass plant layoffs have been announced since the beginning of the year:

The West Virginia State Journal reported at the end of January that the AGC float glass plant in Flemington (Jerry Run) will lay off 180 workers as it stops production, with the furnace on “hothold.”

The Zeledyne float plant in Tulsa, Oklahoma will be shutting a production line, according to newson6.com, laying off 210 architectural glass workers.

Owens-Illinois is closing its Clarion, Pa. container plant in July, 2010, and the Clarion News reports local governments and union officials are working to try to keep the plant open.

We are updating our listings for the upcoming 2010 Glass Factory Directory of North America now, and as always, bracing ourselves to hear bad news about plant closings and layoffs as well as looking for the bright side of the North American glass industry.

As detailed in the Nobel Committee scientific information, “An intense search for suitable transmission media in the optical domain began at the beginning of the 1960s. The optical fiber was, however, mostly set aside because of its high attenuation…The attenuation of the first optical fibers was  typically 1000 dB/km, implying that only 1% of light got transmitted in twenty meters of fiber.”

“…Charles K. Kao was a young engineer at Standard Telecommunications Laboratories (ITT) working on optical communication.   He started under the direction of Karbowiak, and then became in charge of a small group…They investigated in detail the fundamental properties of optical fibers with respect to optical communication.  In particular, they did not consider the physics of waveguides only…but also the material properties.  Their conclusions were presented by Kao in London in the beginning of 1966…”

“The most important result was that losses in dielectric media were mostly caused by absorption and scattering. The predicted attenuation of a few dB/km was found to be much less than that measured at the time.  Consequently, the latter was predominantly caused by impurities, in particular iron ions. Fibers with glass of higher purity could be a good candidate for optical communication.  Damping caused by bending and waveguide imperfections, as well as  propagation and radiation losses were also analyzed and found to be small.  Single mode fibers were presented as the best transmission medium for optical communication.”

“What the wheel did for transport, the optical fiber did for telecommunications,” said Richard Epworth, who worked with Kao at Standard Telecommunications Laboratories in Harlow, England in the 1960s.  “Optical fiber enables you to transmit information with little energy over long distances and to transmit information at very high rates.”

Kao was awarded the 1999 Charles Stark Draper Prize by the National Academy of Engineering (U.S.) along with Robert D. Maurer (Corning Glass)  and John B. MacChesney (Bell Laboratories) who did subsequent work in fiber optic technology.

The RoyMech site has information about measuring glass strength, and links to other sites about glass material properties.

Most applications of glass in buildings use laminated glass or tempered glass.

We get many requests for information about glass from school students, and have a number of links to information sources about glass on our website: Places to Learn More About Glass.  We find that many of the visitors to our website head to this area first.   One link there is to an article from a shower door manufacturer, which discusses the U.S. standards for tempered glass. There are also several videos of glass manufacturing and the machinery involved.

In our “Learn About Glass” section we collect interesting articles which we have found about glass on the Internet. Do you have a link to recommend? Post your link below.

In the afternoon on Opening Day we heard three inspirational presentations.

The first two presentations each mentioned Harvey Littleton and Dominic Labino, who are considered the founding fathers of the studio glass movement. It was in the 1960s that artists began to explore the possibility of creating works in glass, and today, glass art and glass artists receive the greatest public attention and media coverage of any area of glass production.

John Leighton, who received the 2009 Honorary Lifetime Membership Award, talked about his life working in glass, a presentation called “Thoughts of Another Object Maker.” He has maintained a studio since 1972, and was head of the glass program at San Francisco State University for 24 years, and then head of the glass program at California State University, Fullerton. He has been a guest instructor at numerous schools including C.C.A.C., the Pilchuck School, and the Tokyo Glass Art Institute in Japan. His presentation wove the history of the studio glass movement into an account of the students and artists he has worked with in the past 40 years.

Marvin Lipofsky, who received the 2009 GAS Lifetime Achievement Award, used the theme “Thank You Harvey… It’s Been 47 Great Years” to discuss his introduction to glass through Harvey Littleton and the work he has made all over the world, creating glass sculptural series in nearly 70 factories and glass studios. He began to teach at the University of California, Berkeley in 1964 and the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCA) in 1968, and has also been a teacher in many workshops, summer programs, and conferences.

The last presentation in the Opening Ceremony was by Tim McFarlane, of Dewhurst Macfarlane and Partners, who talked about the engineering involved in glass architectural projects around the world. The company designed the glass staircases for Apple stores, the glass Alpine House in Kew Gardens, U.K., and the structural glazing for the Corning Museum of Glass, where many of the Glass Art Conference programs were held, as well as many other glass structures as part of buildings around the world. He concluded his talk by showing models and some pictures of a restoration project in Menokin, Va. which uses glass to replace the missing pieces of a building.

I am not a glass artist, so you will not see me in the picture of 1000 Gaffers (gaffer – a traditional name for glassblowers) that was taken in the “Gaffer District,” the name given to Corning’s historical downtown on Thursday night, but I did enjoy the glass art exhibits at Corning Museum, and being around so many people who love glass objects.

The 40th Glass Art Society Annual Conference will be held in Louisville, Kentucky, June 10-12, 2010.

A recent post on LinkedIn asked for help in finding a supplier to provide custom glass parts. Glass Technology Services in Sheffield, U.K., was recommended. We often recommend that companies contact the American Scientific Glass Association; there is a link to this trade group and other glass-related organizations on our website at: http://www.glassfactorydir.com/Org.html.

In a recent article, the Long Island Business Press stated that the Studebaker Company, which made automobiles until March, 1966, was started by a family named Graham, which they said “started out as bottle makers in Indiana, where they pioneered the technique of upside-down manufacturing, which allowed the molten glass to form a thick lip, making it strong enough to hold a cap instead of a cork.” I have never heard this before – and there are things I do not know about glass history – can anyone tell me more about whether or not this note on the history of the glass industry is correct?

There was a family emergency and I did not make it to the Glass Problems Conference in Columbus in early November. If you were there, write and tell me what you found most useful about the presentations or the people you talked to.