SAFETY GLASS FOR CARS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20982, 19 September 1931, Page 7 (Supplement)

SAFETY GLASS FOR CARS.

m afe/?'- ~ ' USE FOR 21 YEARS. Ipl?. I I gjfety glass lias become prominent 'W*? motorists in Britain within the l«Mt year or so, not only because the lining manufacturers have emphasised it Wl&ng part of their standard equip- |? r L {j n t, because Hie Government has t Sauced legislation concerning it. It |y coincidence that this should have „_flnpd daring wfiat is virtually the :f HPP cu . . - . tonußg-of-age ot thls materlal > a Correspondent of the Times. It was in 1910 that the patent now most generally used was filed, and, al though some forms of unsplinterable , are believed to have been in use so far back as 1900. it was only e !, er jgio that any serious attempt was * ade to manufacture it on a commercial ind scientific basis. It was a motor accident that led to the commercial development of safety glass in the first ■ place. The man who filed the natest wis Edouard Benedictus, poet, chilosopber. painter, musician, chemist, and inventor. He was of Dutch origin .-gnd a descendant -of Spinoza. Benedictus va s born in Paris in 1579 and died in January, 1930. Although Mr. Benedictus' greatest enthusiasm was for music, he was induced to tie up chemistry, and he established jjis own experimental physio-chemical laboratory in. Paris. In 1903. when he w as moving some bottles from one shelf to another, one slipped from his hands and fell the entire height of the room. On picking it up Mr. Benedictus found that it. was starred inside like a crystal, but unbroken because of some strong interior ] support. " Fifteen years before. Mr. Benedictus found from his records the flask had contained a mixture of alcohol, ether, acetone,.amyl acetate, and trinitrocellulose, which had evaporated in the course of time, coating the interior with a cellu-loid-like enamel of high tensile strength. Its cohesive power was so great that at the moment of shock not 'a splinter of glass was detached from the flask or appeared likely to become detached. Mr. Benedictus replaced the bottle and . thought no more about it till he heard of two accidents in which young women were injured by flying glass. Then he recalled the bottle and spent the whole night in. his laboratory planning a programme which Le ultimately carried out. The first piece of safety glass was manufactured with the aid of a copy press. Safety glass is a sandwich of two sheets of glass with celluloid in between, the whole being welded together with a solution of high tensile strength. It was because of its three-ply construction that Mr. Benedictus called his invention " triples" glass. Very little was done for two years with the invention until Mr. Reginald Delpech, a pioneer English motorist, acquired the patent, founded the Triplex Company in England, and began to produce safety glass on a commercial basis. When manufacture began there was little enthusiasm for the idea. Motoring was still in its early stages, and motorists regarded cuts from broken screens as one of the necessary perils of the road. Pavlova, realising that disfigurement by broken glass would ruin her dancing career, was one of the first people to fit safety glass in her car. Mr. Delpech besan a campaign to urge on motorists and manufacturers the danger of ordinary glass in motoring, but before he had carried it very far the war came and with it a wide demand for safety-glass in^ innumerable forms, from aeroplane windshields to bullet-proof windows for tanks and periscopes for submarines. The war had created. a vast number of potential motorists who knew of safety glass, bnt it was not until 1927 that real progress was made in its adoption. This increasing popularity of safety glass has meant the growth of a new industry, employing hundreds of people. In 1914 the sales of the principal concern making safety glasi were only 15,500 square feet per annum. To-dav the figure is over 2,000.000. CONCENTRATED SUNLIGHT. Two years of sunlight were crowded into ft few hours in New York recently when a new wall paper was given a fading test by artificial sunshine. Samples of the paper were stretched over small openings at the base of a large cylinder. Rays from a powerful sun lamp, which was installed within the cylinder, fell on them through the openings. For twenty-four hoars the lamp's powerful rays shone on the new paper, a length of time estimated to be equal to two years of sun. exposure on the walls of an average room. No fading of the new paper was noticed •iter its severe test.