History
Borosilicate glass was first developed by German glassmaker Otto Schott in the late 19th century and sold under the brand name "Duran" in 1893. After Corning Glass Works introduced Pyrex in 1915, the name became a synonym for borosilicate glass in the English-speaking world.
The European manufacturer of Pyrex, Arc International, uses borosilicate glass in its Pyrex glass kitchen products; however, the U.S. manufacturer of Pyrex kitchenware uses tempered soda-lime glass. Thus Pyrex can refer to either soda-lime glass or borosilicate glass when discussing kitchen glassware, while Pyrex, Bomex, Duran, TGI and Simax all refer to borosilicate glass when discussing laboratory glassware.
Most borosilicate glass is colorless. Colored borosilicate, for the studio glass trade, was first widely brought onto the market in 1986 when Paul Trautman founded Northstar Glassworks. In 2000, former Northstar Glassworks employee Henry Grimmett started Glass Alchemy and developed the first cadmium Crayon Colors and aventurine Sparkle colors in the borosilicate palette.
In addition to the quartz, sodium carbonate, and aluminum oxide traditionally used in glassmaking, boron is used in the manufacture of borosilicate glass. The composition of low expansion borosilicate glass such as those laboratory glasses mentioned above is approximately 80% silica, 13% boric oxide, 4% sodium oxide, and 2-3% aluminum oxide. Though more difficult to make than traditional glass due to the high melting temperature required (Corning conducted a major revamp of their operations to make it), it is economical to produce. Its superior durability, chemical and heat resistance finds excellent use in chemical laboratory equipment, cookware, lighting and, in certain cases, windows.
Read more about this topic: Borosilicate Glass
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.
In Beverly Hills ... they don’t throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows.
Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.”
—Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)