Smashing idea: how East Germany invented 'unbreakable' drinking glasses

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/...

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...

This sentence angers the chemist in me. A potassium cation has exactly the same charge as a sodium cation, namely, +1.

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.

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?

"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)"

https://www.zeit.de/stimmts/1999/199933_stimmts_gluehbir

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.

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 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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40260399

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.

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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40260399

Anecdotally, many people hold glasses poorly for fear of warming their drink with their hand.

https://tankglass.com/

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?

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.