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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

  Indeed, there is a growing industry for manufacturing 
  industrial sapphires the size of a large bucket, suitable 
  for use in bullet-proof glass, aeroplane windows and soon 
  - unscratchable smartphone displays.

seriously - Transparent Aluminum :-)

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Plain old corundum - you can get pieces of it the size of your fist if you see what is left after welding railroad tracks with termite.

"... welding railroad tracks with _termite_."

Sheesh! With the above post the state of spelling on the Internet reaches a new low.

They dropped a single letter, and it resulted in something that was still a word. What internet have you been dealing with?

If anyone else was wondering, it was supposed to read ‘thermite’. (I had to DDG it, and then still, I had never heard of the stuff.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite

Thermite is amazing stuff. There's some thought that part of the reason the Hindenburg burned so much so fast was a thermite reaction in the stuff it was painted with:

http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/videos/hindenb...

stereotypically used in supermarket laser barcode scanner windows. Pretty much indestructible.

You can buy optical flats COTS from the usual optics suppliers. You won't like the price, like $100/square inch.

Maybe a decade after the star trek movie with the whales, I almost got a chance to make a very small fish tank out of transparent aluminum, just like in the movie, using broken supermarket scanner windows. Then they found out how much money they could get by reselling the windows, and my free source dried up before I could make the tank. I was assuming standard aquarium silicone would stick to sapphire just as well as it sticks to glass... anyone out there ever get to try it?

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