Glass Production
Recently, I was a bit interested in the production process of glass. I happened to hear a talk from a representative of the Saint-Gobain glass company, who told me a bit about how they make glass.
This company is actually a huge international monster, with thousands of employees. They were founded by the French king Louis XIV in order to make glass for his famous Versailles palace (and on the way, break the Venetian monopoly on glass production) and have made glass ever since. They make a lot of windows - for all those ultra-modern-high-tech-glass-covered-buildings, as well as car windows, and other normal and sophisticated windows.
The way to produce a large, flat, surface, is pretty simple yet cute: they have this huge oven, were they melt the initial ingredients; and from there the melted glass falls into a pool of liquid tin, were it slowly cools down while floating away from the oven. The sights, according to the pictures, are pretty impressive: a huge river of glass, dozens of meters long, red and liquid at one end and solid (and transparent) at the other. It allows them to make very smooth and large surfaces.
Later they can coat them (sometimes they do it using magnetrons, to achieve very goos thin coats) , thus achieving good characteristics. Most funny was the self-cleaning glass (external layers that repel dust, attract water, or whatever you please); the anti-reflective; the glass that can change from milky white to total transparency according to the weather; the car window that changes color, the glass-embedded solar cells that create a glass that produces energy and then a window that provides light to your house both at the day (by letting the sun pass) and at the night (by becoming a light source itself), and other very cool glass features, that some of them look like sci-fi inventions. Very sophisticated and impressive.
All until a kid with a ball plays around.
