East Germany invented 'unbreakable' drinking glasses
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Edit: The article is poorly researched. The design pictured wasn't the only design they sold, it was just the most common one used in restaurants and bars. I had these glasses with kids prints. I found a page which shows a few more designs: https://militariasammlermarkt.de/ddr/zum-thema-ddr-ostalgie/...
> For their range of glasses – which included variants for champagne, schnapps and cognac as well as three different sizes for beer – the designer trio were inspired by the equally beautiful so-called Wirteglas, which the East German designers Margarete Jahny and Erich Müller created in the early 1970s.
> One factor that may have hindered Superfest’s competitiveness in a unified Germany was its functionalist, austere look. Especially in southern parts of the country, drinkers like to swig their beer from glasses decorated with gold edging or engraved coats of arms. “Baroque decoration on a Superfest glass wouldn’t work,” says Höhne. “It would violate the design itself.”
The 6th image in the carousel on that page shows gold rimmed glasses with a decorative design, hardly an austere look.
That's clearly not true... It's not the patterns on the glass that separate a champagne glass from a cognac one. Or different sizes of beer glasses...! Did we read the same sentence?
> That's clearly not true... It's not the patterns on the glass
I was calling attention to where aeyes said “I had these glasses with kids prints.” clearly a reference to decoration not the types of glasses produced.
The company varied both the types of gasses and the decoration on those glasses, but the article is only giving them credit to the types of glass not the wide range of purely cosmetic designs.
And now it's popular again.
Until people forget about it and buy cheap stuff again.
https://www.glass-international.com/news/duralex-employees-t...
I'm guessing that Duralex uses a thermal tempering process where the glass is heated very high and then rapidly cooled to temper it, but I don't know. Maybe Duralex also uses an ion-exchange and it just isn't as good as the Superfest process. Even with smartphone screens, newer techniques from Corning have created much stronger screens than we had 10-15 years ago even though they're all using the same basic ion-exchange technique.
Personally, I love tempered glass even if it might break. They're a lot less likely to break, they're less dangerous if they do break, and they don't really cost that much more. Maybe you'll pay $3/glass for regular soda-lime glasses and $5-6/glass for nice tempered ones, but I bought my tempered glasses a decade ago and still have all of them, despite having moved 3 times (and my packing technique doesn't involve bubble wrap or anything). Maybe Superfest is better, but for my non-restaurant use, tempered glasses like those from Duralex or Bormioli Rocco seem to be good enough.
Until they cut themselves on the sharp edges when it breaks. Duralex is safety glass but some people only see "wow many peaces normal glass only breaks into a few".
Proper cuts from Duralex look like you had a hard fall, proper cuts from normal glass require a trip to the hospital for stitches.
This same acquaintance was surprised to learn that my household doesn’t consume an entire roll of toilet paper each and every day.
Amazing what we take for granted about others’ basic habits of living, in life as in tech…
EDIT: but he's skeptical of all the hype around sharp knives. He finds his butter knives work almost as well.
Ya’ll are clumsy.
The toddler somehow hasn't broken anything yet other than an entire carton of eggs once, which was so hilarious it was worth it. I assume the other people commenting though aren't children ;)
So are you, in the future… if you’re lucky enough to stick around. ;)
There is regional versions depending on where you are located at, available at the top right!
One notable feature of Duralex glasses is that there is a number on the bottom that can go from 1 to 50. A tradition among schoolchildren is to look at that number, which is said to represent your age. In reality, it is the mold number, used for quality control, but that "age" thing is what most people remember it for.
That said, in France they had a connotation of being cafeteria glasses, so perhaps that affected their perceived worth.
But unlike plastic ones in the film, glasses in the article are from modified glass.
In order to fulfill all the memes, we can defenestrate those glasses.
This sentence angers the chemist in me. A potassium cation has exactly the same charge as a sodium cation, namely, +1.
*pursue. *than.
Honestly, given the sentiment expressed, just too funny.
Specialists! Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.
Edit: Could this also be used for window glass?
i'm not sure whether to blame this kind of line extension fraud on unethical management, on consumers who can't tell the difference and consequently buy such fraudulent products whenever they're cheaper, or on poorly-thought-out regulations (making real pyrex emits boria into the air, which is an insecticide and therefore does environmental damage, a consideration probably not relevant to gorilla glass)
Porqué no los tres? CEOs pursuing yet another vacation home, under-educated consumers that lose their minds over 'saving' 1c ("$5.00" too expensive "4.99!" OHH THIS ONE!!), and regulators either with a private-sector agenda or who have no teeth because Congress is politically compromised.
There's more than enough blame to spread around.
I think dishwashing and/or age does eventually make it more fragile, but it seems fairly durable. I've lost one piece in 7 years.
This fad word can't die soon enough.
At the same time the old European factories can make specialty glasses cheap enough for schools and pubs.
What if some person like Einstein invented glass to begin with, it would not take that much insight to conclude that the "weak point" was how easily it can be broken. If they really started working on that problem from the very beginning you would expect more progress the more centuries that it was continued.
OTOH what if inventing glass was not the result of very much of an intellectual exercise, anybody can still see the disadvantages when it come to breakage. But they might not start to do anything about it until centuries later. Who knows?
What if just barely making glass was (almost) like a lost art where it took a few centuries for someone like Einstein to come along and take an interest in a way that could add more scientific process, even if still illiterate.
Or maybe even more likely, an intermittent series of lesser Einsteins make their contributions to a geographical technical center of excellence which did originally arise from a gifted or fortunate individual at the beginning. Maintaining the status quo (as an art center producing recognized "masterpieces") over generations until the next amazing experimentalist gains a position influential enough to make a contribution so worthwhile it lasts more centuries into the future.
Pretty amazing when you think about it, they didn't even have half the chemical elements there are today ;)
I don't think this glass is any less prone to recycling than standard sodium glass since it looks to be a post process with largely the same input materials.
Even then, the sources are very at the very least consistent in their makeup. It's a lot easier to deal with a consistent type of contamination than a varying one.
I'm sure people have tried that though and it doesn't work for some reason.
Pretty sure the chemical reaction to actually dissolve glass is not particularly fast and I have no idea what you'd do to later precipitate it out, but it may not be an economically viable approach.
As I understand it, the substitution of larger potassium ions for smaller sodium ions in the surface layer creates a compressive stress in the surface, and while this results in a counterbalancing tension in the interior, it is the surface compression which inhibits crack propagation.
This is how tempered glass works, except the surface compression and interior tension is the result in the greater shrinkage of the slowly-cooling interior. The interior tension is also the reason why these glasses shatter into tiny pieces when they do break (see also Prince Rupert's drops: there are many videos on Youtube.)
I am wondering if the chemical process is slow, which might be another reason for it not being adopted for ordinary objects such as drinking glasses.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemically_strengthened_glas...
And yes, it works the same way as thermally toughened glass (inducing a compressive stress near the surface).
I have seen it said about Supafest drinking glasses that they do shatter into tiny pieces when they do break, though I do not know whether the source was reliable. If this is the case, then it suggests there is some difference between the Supafest and Corning / Gorilla Glass processes.
There's always a corresponding tension in the interior, the sum of forces in each direction are balanced. But if the outer compressed region is thin, you won't need as much internal tension.
The article uses “tension” informally, meaning under mechanical stress. I would not read too much into that. But yes, you are right.
> I am wondering if the chemical process is slow, which might be another reason for it not being adopted for ordinary objects such as drinking glasses.
The fact that such glasses tend to fail catastrophically and shatter in small shards is a problem, for something that is used in homes, often with children, and that is bound to break at some point. Not great from a safety perspective.
These hardened glasses are sharper when they smash. They tend to smash after a few drops, but more drops than normal glasses.
They solve a historical problem from East Germany: lack of resources to make glass, which is no longer a problem. Normal glasses are recyclable. EDIT: No apparently they are not, so maybe that's useful?
Why? This just sounds like planned obsolescence.
>as they're meant to be replaced regularly
Why? Is it a real hygrine problem or something?
Making the scratches obvious makes clear to the pub landlord that they need to be replaced (and tips patrons off so they'll put pressure on the landlord by not coming back).
Honestly, I've never heard of this before and I have friends working in the restaurant industry. Is it a real documented health hazard or a FUD spread by the glass manufacturers to create perpetual demand for their product (Glass As A Service)?
My grandma still uses the same glassware from like 30+ years ago and washes it by hand and it doesn't look tarnished at all. Is she and our family likely to die from drinking from those old glassware with micro scratches?
That's the key part here. Pubs use commercial dishwashers which effectively shot blast your dishes and glasses. There's a reason you can see "Not dishwasher safe" on certain items: because it'll blast off the nice patterns. I know because I've done it by accident.
I guess that could cause abrasion if there's hard and sharp particles in the water, but I'm not sure what could cause those. Maybe if glass breaks during washing, but I'd assume the machine filters the water before reusing it.
There's a couple of sources:
- The dishwasher tablets have a mildly abrasive substance
- The water itself (especially in the UK) can carry abrasive substances from the pipes
Dishwasher detergent does not contain abrasive substances; dissolve a teaspoon of it in a glass of hot water and see for yourself.
Same substances with different processes produce different results.
I've nerve seen it on glassware though. That warning is usually for plastics since they melt at hot dishwasher water, and on certain metal cook-ware where the caustic dishwasher detergent will corrode the metal anodization, but glass is usually resistant to both temperature and caustic detergents, which is why it's used in bio labs for storing and mixing harsh chemicals, granted, different composition of glass, but it's still glass not adamantium.
So this point doesn't scan for me.
No but the process that strips the paint off delicate crockery is self-evidently abrasive, which stands to reason when you look at the scratch marks in glass that has been through too many cycles.
It's not on glass because an individual washing won't destroy it but repeated washing eventually scratches the glassware to hell. I've seen it with my own eyes.
Marks on glass are not due to abrasion, they appear because glass is slightly soluble in alkaline water, which is the case in dishwashers. Porcelain and stainless steel do not get scratched by dishwashers for example.
I know for a fact they use dishwashers (I've seen them) and that dishwashers scratch the hell out of your glasses (I've seen that too). Handwashing simply doesn't do this. Dishwashers work by, effectively, shot-blasting your dishes and glasses so I can see the mechanism by which your glassware will get scratched. I don't see how this happens when you're handwashing with Fairy liquid and a soft sponge.
Thank you for the explanation but already knew it, just going towards the part where commercial washers are less "soap" and more sani-solution.
They really shouldn't be, forcing CO2 out of suspension is exactly what you don't want. It causes the beer to become flat more quickly. This is why good beer bars use a glass washer right before serving, to remove any small particles that may end up in the glass and cause nucleation.
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2971/0116/files/dirty_beer...
This isn't meant to be a nationalistic point, but America has a relatively undeveloped beer culture; beer is often kept and served very poorly and drinkers rarely notice. British, Belgian or German drinkers will notice, complain and tell all their friends if you aren't serving beer properly.
(I count myself amongst them, despite only being 3/32 German...)
What is this even supposed to mean?
Where are they loud? I never hear people in the pub/bar shout "My glass has micro-scratches, this is undrinkable!".
Yeah, no, that's an American PoV/meme to think all those nationalities somehow are fickle about the glass of the beer when in reality most of them wouldn't even notice in real life. Beer drinking is a causal activity there, not a sommelier activity where every detail is scrutinized.
You go to the park and it's full of Germans drinking beer out damn aluminum cans. Most bars are so dark and loud and people so drunk, the last thing they care about is if their beer glass is pitch perfect.
People do care about the quality of the beer, but the quality of the glass, not so much.
As a Guinness fan I gladly go to a pub that does it correctly, compared to one that doesn't.
So the idea that there is a business impact to having lower quality experience even visiaul can not just be ignored by saying 'drinking is causal'.
As a pub you have to try to offer something that you can't get from aluminum cans in the park.
Clearly, this is false, and it is enough to visit such a country or look at beer sales to know that this is the case.
At the same time, I will agree that the average beer and what is considered "drinkable" in probably any European country is significantly better than the swill that passes as average in the US.
It isn't a matter of being a connoisseur's fetish, but about the basic standards expected by a large bulk of drinkers. "Craft beer" is a fairly novel and niche product in the US, but even Wetherspoons - a huge chain known for selling very cheap beer - serves a wide range of (often local) real ale in most of their pubs. Many thousands of British pubs are members of Cask Marque, a voluntary accreditation scheme that requires regular inspections of their cellar-keeping and the quality of their beer. America has a burgeoning beer culture, but much of the country is still a beer desert where the only widely available beers are pasteurised lagers. The effects of prohibition are still being felt today, because it takes generations to develop a proper beer culture.
Also, most of what counts as craft beer in the US wouldn't even legally pass as beer here.
This would have been true decades ago. It hasn't been true anytime recently, even more than a decade ago. At this point, craft beer is available bottled and canned in the typical supermarket and even gas station/convenience store in the US, even dive bars have at least one tap for craft beer or at least some bottles (although it is likely not going to serve it in high quality glassware), and craft beer makes up more than a quarter of the total dollars sold in the US beer market and nearly 15% of the volume.
You say this, but at the same time, the most popular beers drunk in every European country are pasteurised lagers as well. In fact, lagers are popular /all over the world/ for the same reason: They are light, easy to drink, cheap to produce and buy, and refreshing when served cold in hot weather.
I've been in plenty of historic pubs in the UK that were unfortunately acquired and ruined by Wetherspoons. A Wetherspoons is in no way any better than the average dive bar in the US, except that in the US it is commonplace for a bar to serve only alcohol and no food, where in the UK pubs are generally expected to have food.
Depends on the state; in mine, a bar can sell beer without a liquor license, but getting a liquor license (required not only for booze but for wine as well) involves jumping through a lot of hoops, one of which is that no more than X% of your sales by dollar amount can come from alcohol. There are no bars that are just bars, unless they only serve beer.
A practical side effect is that lunches are very competitively priced in restaurants that have busy bars, because they take the hit at lunch in order to allow wine/liquor sales.
Food, god no, wouldn't want to cause a fuss. Uncooked chicken? I'll just push it to the side and eat the rest.
Really? You're not just being facetious?
I NEVER send food back if I just don't like it. If it's under-seasoned or not up to my standards, no big deal. I'll go elsewhere next time.
But if it's a food safety issue, or if I order something pricey and it's missing a key ingredient (they don't have to take it back in that case, just bring that ingredient to the table and we're good). I mean, if you paid for it and you can't eat it because it's unsafe or you didn't get what you paid for ... that should be totally understandable and expected that it gets sent back. I've worked in food service and while I would never spit on anyone's food no matter how much of a dick they are, I wouldn't even feel the temptation if it was a legit kitchen screw-up.
I thought Brits hate head on beer.
https://bucolicaholic.com/2016/09/01/on-real-ale-the-sparkle...
Northern drinkers traditionally prefer a thicker, creamier head and used beer pumps with a "sparkler" nozzle to provide this, while southern drinkers typically preferred very little head; this historic divide is starting to soften in recent years.
Some European beer styles are properly served with a bigger and frothier head, particularly wheat beers and pilsners.
You are extremely incorrect on this point. I think this is true if you think of your typical dive bar in the US, but this is more a /cost/ point than a point of the beer culture. Dive bars are not expected to be good, just cheap. The best beers in the world of every style (except Belgian beers) are in made in the US. The US revived craft brewing and spread it around the world, and brought craft brewing to parts of the world that never had any serious beer culture. American beer is /far/ far more than light beers shotgunned out of a can in the parking lot during a college football game.
There are numerous craft bars in the US that take the quality of their pours, including the quality of the glassware very seriously. The US helped to pioneer the certification process for serving beer, modeled after that for wine. The BJCP was founded in 1985 in Colorado, as an offshoot of the American Homebrewer's Association, and the Cicerone Certification program was founded 25 years ago in the US as well. The US has done a significant amount, not just for itself, but for the world, to establish high standards of excellence for the making of beer and the serving of beer.
I say this as someone who is an expert on beer. I have traveled to more than 70 countries, in part specifically to drink beer. I have brewed beer for more than 20 years. I have judged beer competitions. I am a certified cicerone. I have drank more than ten thousand unique beers and been to more than 2500 breweries in my life. It is completely ignorant (and a nationalistic ignorance) to say that the US has a poor beer culture. This might have been true in the 1970s, it is not true today, and it hasn't been true for decades.
It's a requirement of the volume calibration - beer glasses used for commercial purposes are classified as certified measurement devices under EU law, you have to print on the glass the year in which the required stamp got affixed [1]. This serves to provide the customer with a way to check if they're being sold the correct amount of beer.
Fun fact, this was a massive issue for stone mugs and led to a lot of confusion when the regulation became enforced [2].
[1] https://www.agme.de/?qs_servlet=downloadIxServlet&rq_RecId=3...
[2] https://germany.representation.ec.europa.eu/news/klarstellun...
Is this the case in reality? Everywhere I've lived drinking glasses were not accepted as part of domestic glass recycling due to their composition [0]
Perhaps there is a commercial recycling route for pubs though? A quick google didn't turn anything up.
[0] https://www.friendsofglass.com/ecology/what-glass-can-you-re...
From a glass making point of view you don't want them messing with expansion coefficients and bulk properties so they're off the table there - it's a waste of energy to reheat them up to ~ 1,000 C.
But you do end up with large volumes of glass .. a relatively consistant material, you might want to crush and tumble that (to take the sharp edges away) and use that sized grit | frit as driveway material, as additive to concrete where structurally sound, as fish tank "sand", etc.
The tumbling was only meant to be applied to application requiring rounded grit, you're correct that concrete and other uses might prefer jagged.
Hmm, practical concerns about acquisition aside, would lunar dust work?
The recycling containers here have separate containers for clear glass and coloured glass and I've always thought glass is glass.
Now I checked in detail what is accepted, and sure enough, drinking glasses and mirrors are specifically disallowed.
All the places I know (Denmark/Germany) the glass you want to recycles is getting dumped in containers where it breaks most of the time when you toss it in.
I was first confused by this because here in France we have this popular practice, mainly at the school cafeteria, to look at the bottom of our glass to know how old we are (actually it's the mold number obviously...) and depending of the people, the younger (or the older) gets to fetch water for everyone else during lunch.
https://eu.duralex.com/en/blogs/inspirations/et-toi-tu-as-qu...
I never ran a restaurant but Googling around it seems like bars replace around 100% of the glasses annually due to breaking. That sounds like a lot...
> Normal glasses are recyclable
I've never seen anyone collecting broken glass and putting it in a special glass-bin. The glass bin we have in Amsterdam isn't one that you can even push broken glass into if you wanted - it's shaped specifically to receive bottles.
Most resources online hint that the reason this hard glass didn't become successful is because there's a lot of profit to be made by reselling glasses when your old glass breaks.
It wouldn't take large shards of a plate window but it definitely can accept anything with one dimension that doesn't exceed 10cm or so, which is almost all the broken glass we've wanted to put into it.
That may be, but rem ember of the three things you should be doing - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - Recycling is the worst and should be avoided anytime the other two are doable.
The raw material for glass making is basically sand, and there's no problem dumping old glasses in a landfill.
So you should only recycle glass, if that's cheaper than making glass from scratch. There's no benefit otherwise.
(And you can still reduce and re-use, of course.)
Recycling is not energy neutral. Far from it.
> Clearly glasses last a long time, I don't think smashing is the kind of issue they're making it out to be.
Clearly not. Spend 2 hours in any crowded bar or restaurant and you will hear the sound of glass smashing into pieces.
I think that is a TikTok 'story' which sounds reasonable and is spreading despite it being not true. Yes perhaps the year can be an indication of older glass and perhaps they have more wear, but that is down to use and care rather than just age and not what the year means.
The M mark indicates the year the tooling for that specific glass was certified and marked. Years ago the glasses were manufactured, then tested for capacity, and finally stamped to show they passed.
More recently the manufacturer, this is a major factor for plastic glasses which are moulded, has their process and tooling regularly certified and random samples regularly tested. This means they can be marked during manufacturing rather than an additional process.
This has a good overview of the markings on a UK drinks glass https://advancedmixology.com/blogs/art-of-mixology/what-does...
A bit of legislation from Trading Standards who police it. https://www.southwark.gov.uk/assets/attach/2503/Alcoholic-dr...
A bit of Government legislation about applying the mark. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/applying-a-crown-symbol-to-pint-...
"Is it actually true that light bulb manufacturers could have produced light bulbs with an almost unlimited life a long time ago, but don't want to in order to stay in business? Rainer Mauersberger, Tucson (USA)
I don't want to speculate here about the motives of the light bulb manufacturers, but just want to list a few facts.
1. every light bulb (as it is correctly called) has a limited service life because tungsten atoms constantly evaporate from the filament and the wire breaks at some point.
2. how long the wire lasts can be "adjusted", for example by making it thicker or thinner. However, if you make it glow less brightly and thus increase its service life, the already poor efficiency drops even further - a standard light bulb only converts four percent of the electrical energy into light.
3) Since December 24, 1924, there has in fact been an international "light bulb cartel", which was essentially controlled by the companies General Electric (USA), Osram/Siemens (Germany) and Associated Electrical Industries (Great Britain). This cartel not only divided up the global markets among themselves, but also reached agreements on how long a light bulb should last - since the Second World War, this has been 1,000 hours. In the Soviet Union and Hungary, there have always been bulbs with a longer service life; the Chinese bulb still burns for 5000 hours today.
4) The inventor Dieter Binninger developed a light bulb with a considerably longer life expectancy, which he also patented. His three improvements: a new form of filament
filament, a glass bulb filled with noble gas and a diode as a "dimmer". The Binninger bulb lasted 150,000 hours and consumed only around 50 percent more energy than an ordinary bulb for the same light output. Binninger produced the light bulbs himself, but then negotiated with the Treuhand to take over the GDR company Narva. Shortly after submitting his offer, the light bulb revolutionary crashed in a private plane in 1991.
5 Today, light bulbs are no longer manufactured in the new federal states. Light bulbs in the western world still have a life span of 1000 hours. Christoph Drösser
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)"
The longer lasting lightbulbs were worse at everything except lasting longer. This was not malicious.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NIAbt_GxPsg
The problem with unbreakable glass is once it hits a really hard material, like a grain of quartz, or a ceramic fragment, it breaks just the same.
Seems to me like they last long enough when taken care of, and in situations where you don't the "unbreakable" glass splinters into a rather nasty dust like material.
If a glass costs €1 and lasts 1 year, and an unbreakable glass costs €10 and lasts 5 years, that's not a big win.
The point remains, longer lasting glasses may or may not be superior.
But kWh, or grammes of glass, or carbon credits, or whatever you want.
Normal glass is very recyclable and doesn't require a lot of energy or resource to recycle. "Long life" glass may well not be recycled at all.
Now you're paying 5x more for 1.5x life. etc etc.
Edit: Apparently glass cookware and drinking glasses are often not recyclable. This seems like a more important aspect to improve than durability even if, again, still overall a small improvement compared to overall glass industry.
Broken glass has to be cleaned up, causes injuries, even causes lost product in some situations.
I was in a cocktail bar once with three friends who ordered us the same chilled cocktail, served there day in, day out, and as the cocktails were poured into the glasses, three of the four glasses broke. Plink, plink, plink.
Glasses too hot, cocktail too cold, some other handling problem. Who knows. But tougher glass might not have done that.
Make all glasses recyclable. Probably more important but less marketable for a new startup idea...
Ironically, most of his patrons were medical students.
My grandfather many decades ago came home with a pack of "unbreakable" glasses. My grandmother asked why he had bought them. He shrugged and replied "well, if you don't want them..." and threw them all on the floor.
They all broke, of course.
My grandmother was not amused. She was a very serious person. The rest of the family is still laughing on 60 years later.
Shatter resistant is a better term. :) Or as Jerryrigeverything says 'glass is glass'.
Interesting how the article laments, that they did not name the designers, but then happily ignore the names of the actual inventors of the material:
"The groundbreaking technology they deployed was developed in the 1970s at the Department for Glass Structure Research at the Central Institute for Inorganic Chemistry near Dresden. The material scientists there knew that when glass breaks, it is typically due to microscopic cracks in the material’s surface which form during the production process. Dramatically increasing the toughness of the glass surface was possible, they found, by replacing the smaller sodium ions in the glass with electronically charged potassium ions. Potassium ions need more space, pressing harder against neighbouring atoms and building up more tension that needs to be overcome for the microscopic cracks to get bigger"
I believe the technology in itself, is a bit more admirable and rather the people involved mentioning, than those who were using it to shape a glass.
I challenge anyone to name the inventor of the fridge. At least in my country it is completely unknown who it was.
But, again (merely sourcing from Wikipedia) the idea of evaporative cooling is ancient.
Even Einstein, it’s the continuity of previous works, etc.
Failures that other did are also saving precious time.
This is why the idea of patents is just absurd.
Everybody should have the right to create anything they want, and the natural selection will do its work on keeping the best implementations alive.
Well, not absurd. The last person on the chain contributed a lot to extending the chain.
But yeah, ridiculously overblown. Patents should be a much lighter thing.
Yes, but the claim was that some kind of fame was stolen from the "real inventor of the fridge" (sic).
And the parent's point is that the one considered the inventor atm (deservingly or not), hardly has any fame to begin with. Sure, he might have a Wikipedia entry, along with OnlyFans creators and every minor character in Star Wars lore. Including non-movie characters.
She did not have a lot of positive things to say about that class. Of note, she was the only science major in the class.
I guess that it is in the same way you do not hear about the engineers and designers at Apple, Space X, etc.
> I believe the technology in itself, is a bit more admirable and the people involved mentioning, than the mere shaping.
But we hear all the time about CEOs and their opinions, thou. And they are way less interesting that the tech and the engineers that work at their companies.
Never mind that even for those well known to us engineers, regular people couldn't name what they did either, except maybe Edisson, Tesla, Wright Brothers, and a few more. E.g. would even more modern PhD holders know what Watt contributed? Or Lord Kelvin?
People like Gates, Bezos, Musk, and Jobs on the other hand, everybody knows.
They are mostly known for being rich. Very very rich. Way better engineers creating way better products are not well known.
"Great engineering" is not the word choice I will go for to describe their legacy.
I just posted a comment in which I doubt the article's explanation of the physics behind the process: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41180590
I would say it helps to start early.
I really do get the idea that in pre-literate times some scientific progress was continued over many generations more impressively by lifetimes of hands-on incremental advances, rather than through documentation which could only be deciphered by the few, and utilized by even fewer.
If they continued with the prior borosilicate based formula these could be high-temperature sanitized and reused when making bottles and it works better for the hot/cold cycles typical of high temperature sanitization and cool wash-downs used in commercial bar settings.
The same thing happened to the Pyrex brand. It used to be the gold standard for glass bakeware because it was made from borosilicate glass which made it much more drop resistant /and/ better for heat/cool cycles. Now Pyrex branded products have gone to being made predominantly of soda-lime based formulas and newer Pyrex dishes are known for being prone to exploding when you move a casserole prepped the night before from the fridge/freezer to the oven.
I really wish we still had seriously durable high-quality products available and we weren't regressing to lowest common denominator across our society. Soda-lime glass is not a buy-it-for-life product, regardless of what you do to the formula.
https://www.allrecipes.com/article/what-is-the-difference-be...
While we are talking Neat! glass: Ball Aerospace is where you want to focus for a sec as well.
Ball aerospace basically is the secret tech gian few know about - specifically in their high-end lenses for all the nifty spy thingies...
But the Ball Brothers did a bunch of other nifty things - my favorite being the Mason Jar.
--
What I like about this story, is how it reignites the vision I have for a stackable Mason Jar thats unbreakable such as the German glass. - but as a core packaging line.
I have a large number of mason jars as my primary drinking vessels - but I want a service, like the milk-men of olde, and have a fully functional closed loop product, package delivery infra built on high tech mason jars, stackable, made from unbreakable-ish things, inclusive of glass foams (aerogels in the walls based on 3d printing a microfoam of glass then encasing it... and having a ceramic induction coil in the base of the glass so you can use an induction coaster (of varying size) to heat/ cook that which is in the mason jar... the jars interlock so you can stack extension tubes onto them. but all based on mason jar everything. aside from the hyper stackable.
(Also I noteced that the drop science behind that beer glass is that it provides the lip for you to rest it in your hand, and its designed to not break from the angle that a drunk person most typically drops his drink - too drunk, and has a week grip - so it just slips straight down... mostly)
https://www.ball.com/our-company/our-story/history-timeline
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-selects-ball-aerospac...
It's kind of expensive, though.
Would you buy a lifetime glass for 500$?
This argument never made sense to me.
Of course if you go to the big glass retailers. That just sounds like dumb marketing. It clearly would require a smaller retailer that could disrupt.
The people you have to convince to buy these are the direct consumers who carry the cost. Combine that maybe with some financial products to make it easy to acquire or directly cooperate with drinks companies, or distribution companies.
Or I mean there are lots of other potential markets for glass.
At the very least they are not telling the full story here. If this glass is really so amazingly superior, and such a no-brainer, then somebody could have saved a lot of money here. More likely the company was just not positioned or lead well enough to figure out a strategy.
At the vary least I need more then a one supporter with skin in the game saying 'we were just to good'. I have heard that often and its sometimes true, more often it isn't.
There was lack of money for investments unless you got sold to Western investors who might or might not have understood the value of your product. Eastern companies notoriously had old machines and low productivity and no experience in sales & marketing. Wages had to be paid in hard currency all of a sudden while traditional markets in the East did not have this hard currency. Western markets usually were already very competitive (as mentioned in the article where they tried to sell to Western Germany a couple of years before).
Additionally, there was no internet back then, so crowdfunding wasn't available, direct selling to consumers was very hard, and sophisticated market places did not exist.
I know those glasses, they were indeed very good, but kind of out of fashion in the early 90's.
It doesn't matter if they _theoretically_ last a long time, if people are still going to throw them away to freshen up their cupboard of glasses to keep up with the latest fashions.
I wouldn't assume that all these "assets" of bars, pubs, Mitropa etc. were for example sold off, i.e. you can expect quite a big number being dumped/destroyed, aside of the numbers that went into wear and tear until 1990 in the first place.
There is a lot of stuff that was ubiquitous during the time of East Germany and went poof pretty fast after the wall came down, usually into the dumpster in one way or another.
also usually with time companies figure out ways to reduce costs of production/process
Some decades ago, a manufacturer from East Germany, former GDR, was participating at a fair for lights and light bulbs. This manufacturer invented a light bulb that never burns its glow wire.
At some point during the fair the companies from West Germany had a big laugh on that manufacturer, mocking him and his invention. Their argument: If you build a bulb like this, how are you going to make money?
Now, I cannot say why we don't have glasses like this already but my assumption is that the monetary incentive is seen as being contradictory to such an invention.
"The cartel tested their bulbs and fined manufacturers for bulbs that lasted more than 1,000 hours."
Make a million light bulbs and sell all of them and then do whatever it is that you want.
Similar to finding a cure for cancer. There's a huge market that you can just eliminate and then retire.
In the US, consumers like stuff that is cheap, and don't seem to care much if it is poor quality and breaks - they'll just buy another.
In the UK, at least when I lived there 30 years ago, people seemed content to pay more for quality items that would last longer.
I noticed when I moved to the US and saw same brand, e.g. Black & Decker selling cheap plastic US-only versions of products compared to their heavy duty cast iron counterparts sold in the UK that would last forever.
The gist is that by running bulbs at a lower power, you can greatly prolong its life, but the downside is that it doesn't heat up as much, and since emissions spectrum correllates with temperature, ends up being much worse at converting electricity to light, which ends up being not worth it.
Anecdotally, many people hold glasses poorly for fear of warming their drink with their hand.
The glass is very thin though; the trade-off being that if it was regular thickness it would be very heavy and big relative to the contents - and your hands. This makes them even more likely to break!
However, the brand Bodum do nice onces made from Borosilicate Glass.
Why would they care about recycling it? It's not a disposable product. If it breaks you can't recycle it anyway (at least in the US recyclers don't want broken glass). Isn't durable good enough?
Or is this a result of Germany's obsessive recycling culture?
In France glass is explicitly broken upon deposit at the recycle bin. I'd guess it's the same in Germany.
> Or is this a result of Germany's obsessive recycling culture
God forbid anyone thinks a little bit ahead to avoid extra waste.
The very thing that makes an item durable also makes it hard to recycle, something that is hard to break is also hard to decompose and recompose into a new item. Also you should only invest all that energy into creating something if you plan to use it for a long time.
A highly durable glass cup is great... but only if you use it for a long time. If you recycle it you've failed. The literal mass of the finished glass is trivial compared to the energy invested in creating it.
Sometimes you also get issued a "token" and the refund is only possible with the token, so you can't return other cups you find lying around.
The token is ridiculous and makes no sense. I've actively interrogated GPT4 on it and it becomes increasingly nonsensical trying to explain it.
Possession of the cup itself is proof in itself that I possess the item of value worth the pfand. The token itself is pointless.
[0] (in Spanish) https://www.elsaltodiario.com/ecoembes/miente-investigacion-...
Maybe we could try to do that with standard glass glasses.
Phrases like planned obsolescence and market cannibalisation come to mind.
Remember back when even a mid range HiFi amplifier came with quality service manuals, and lasted for a lifetime ?
Sure, it was more expensive relatively. But you only had to buy it once.
With the current climate uncertainty, we need to find a way to incentivise quality, reliability and repairability.
There is so much ephemeral junk being produced.
I've heard this story repeated multiple times but I've never bought it. Unless there is a glass cartel, i.e. crony capitalism, I have a hard time believing that consumers wouldn't storm the gates for unbreakable glassware.
If I were a bar owner, and I had near 100% restocking of my glassware annually (which I believe is in the ballpark of the actual number), I would be willing to bypass my supply chain and order these glasses directly from the manufacturer.
I can't see how someone couldn't make a decent living off the addressable market of one time sales of this glassware.
This doesn't seem like it is a true market dynamic - but I might be missing something.
It would be interesting to have some supporting evidence for this conspiracy theory. Perhaps the Guardian expects us to buy it because it plays into our preconceptions about evil capitalists vs. morally pure socialists.
A demonstration that the economy isn't economical at all, when it comes to resources.
You can imagine other reasons why we shouldn't make products last forever, it's a huge over-investment of limited resources that could be used in the future for better things. Specially in a planet with limited resources but continuously evolving technology, it is really not good to make forever stuff unless the technological innovation stops. Because you could use the same resources later to do better stuff at the same cost.
What we should do is wherever possible make things repairable and prosecute anyone that intentionally makes something harder to repair (not really applicable to glass, where recycling is the only option).
Fashion benefits from morals - like the idea of showering daily benefits the cosmetics/body care industry. I have a relative in one of the big French companies who saw a huge drop-off in shampoo/bathing products during covid when people were working at home. If we all decided that fresh water was too precious to waste we might materially impact this person's business - so they are eager to convince everyone that it's morally right to wash umpteen times a day.
Similarly clothing is marketed and that marketing works on us.
Other than telling such people to f-off, how do we get out of the negative loop they are only too eager to drive us into?
So if some activity were to be negative for everyone - e.g. if it generated a lot of waste that was hard to handle and caused large unnecessary carbon emissions .... then we could end up needing laws to limit that damage.
yet here we are, 50 years later, still using glass containers and fluorescent tube lamps that break because they are designed to break every two years
Even though I tried to steer people away from the known questionable quality stuff (for no benefit of my own, not on commission), 95% of people would get it anyways. For the same reason "oh, I'm thinking of selling it soon anyways." And they rarely actually seemed to, based on my memory, but they had that mindset.
Glasses are perhaps more 'timeless', but I could see them not selling well at a premium because of the 'ephemeral' mindset of potential life and style changes.
Possibly if you need to charge x% more then your sales might drop off almost entirely as you raised your price to that level.