GLASS SILK

Taranaki Daily News, 22 June 1935, Page 22 (Supplement)

GLASS SILK

ITS BEAUTY AND UTILITY. ROMANCE •. OF- -MODERN INDUSTRY. A great new industry has come to stay. Broken or cracked milk bottles have become as useful as they were once useless. '• The dairies and milk distributing centres of Glasgow now collect and send them to a factory, where they are melted down and transformed into that strange and lovely material known as glass silk. One cracked milk bottle, it is said, may be changed into a fairy thread several miles long. The strands are only a thousandth of an inch thick. Odd pieces of broken glass of all Shapes and sizes are also used. The milk bottles are first put into small electric furnaces. Soon they become molten, run through small holes, and are then spun into strands on fastrevolving drums. Thousands of miles of thread, finer than strands of silk, are made into great hanks and placed in a drying room. When dry the threads are spread out, laid across and across each other, and quilted with asbestos thread. In this network are millions of minute cells of air which give the new material one of its most valuable qualities. It keeps out sound and keeps in heat. Cinema walls are being covered with the substance to improve the acoustics, and floors, ceilings and walls are being lined with it to make them soundproof. On liners and in factories, steelworks, and so on boilers are made into great thermos flasks by being blanketed over with glass silk. As this keeps in the heat hundreds of tons of coal are saved. Even the little steam drifters are now having their boilers covered in this way. The latest news of glass silk is that the criss-cross threads are sandwiched between ordinary panes of glass and used for windows. The new glass admits ultra-violet rays, and the light, instead of passing straight through, is caught on the many facets of the glass threads and diffused evenly throughout the room. The air cells trapped in the glass silk insulate the room, keeping the temperature even in winter or summer.