How Glass is Made

oh you know it's such a simple routine act of everyday life its opening and closing a window yet I'm not really sure how or why this window glass started out as a heap of sand so how do you go from sand well perfectly clear window are you still here the story of Windows starts here way up here 60 feet off the ground in Carlisle Pennsylvania at PPG these are giant massive silos that hold the key ingredients to glass the main one sand everyday 800 tons of it are fed into the building here and then mixed with 2 elements critical to the manufacture of window glass soda ash and lime or sodium carbonate and calcium carbonate they lower the melting point of silicon and alter its basic molecular structure these chemicals soften the glass and make it easier to melt they terminate the silicon-oxygen chains and make a more manageable task to work with and that's soda lime soda the glass lies at the heart of every window now all of our raw materials have been mixed together and dumped into tanks like these where it's a cool low 3,000 degrees it's actually hotter than molten lava and it will take three days for a single molecule of sand to get from this point all the way to the other end of the factory where it actually starts to resemble a sheet of glass all right so we're wearing this protective garment for a reason right right right Kevlar gloves fire retardant we're dressed like big oven mitts right yeah it's pretty hot where we are but it's gonna get a lot hotter the side right yeah let's break Steve Anderson and I have to rake this batch quickly goal well don't let the rake melt first and spread out the mix to reduce air pockets that might fool whole rap over the wall it's like tapping just like that it doesn't take long for the batch to start looking less like sand and more like an overflowing volcano the only way to see this river of glass is through these polarized metal masks without them your vision will be well gone there inside that shiny surface on the bottom that is liquid glass for ten hours the molten mix is superheated behind thick walls to allow gas to bubble up and out bubbles drive glass makers nuts after all nobody wants to look at a window you can't see through there is only one way to create plate glass without bubbles and more importantly flat on both sides if a window isn't flat it'll distort your vision like a wrong pair of glasses but making flat window panes is hard and it used to be done by blowing giant glass bubbles cutting them open and laying them flat before they solidified but they didn't end up perfectly flat so since 1959 glass has been made by pouring molten glass on a river of liquid tin the surface of any vast undisturbed liquid is flawlessly flat tin ingots are melted down creating that perfectly flat surface the glass pours out of the tin and immediately begins to cool 10 and glass don't mix like oil and water the lighter glass floats on the denser 10 and the result is a materia system where the liquid glass and liquid tin started high-temperature one into this giant river and they cool they're cooled deliberately until at the end the tin still liquid but the glass is solidified compared to glass tim's melting point is low by the time it reaches this stage of the assembly the glass hardens floating on top of the molten tin like driftwood on water still very hot as in 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit the glass moves down the line in one long continuous sheet it stretches a quarter of a mile and because of its length and temperature it's surprisingly elastic and strong enough to really beat on this blast as hard as you want you all break that glass it's extremely strong its pristine state law I think you've actually proved your point there so from here to there you need to bring it down about 100 degrees or degrees and that's why we have such a long cooling conveyor is to allow it just to cool down naturally a robot then cuts this long ribbon of glass into slabs that run about 12 feet across these long pieces of glass have been cut and in a moment they'll be packaged and then shipped to their distributors where they'll be turned into Windows to make Windows we Hall glass down the road aways through a window factory called by wind code in Morgantown Pennsylvania where on average 400 sheets of plate glass stream in all day destined to become window panes working with this stuff can be very dangerous now this is kind of like Kevlar yeah some say this is Kevlar material this is the same stuff they use in bulletproof vests yes yep when you're pulling them off the table you pretty much that class is right at your waist okay that your your leg area so we want to make sure that's protected always put your Kevlar sleeves on first and II dare I ask has anyone ever been cut yes okay I had no idea that deke was making a comeback blue suit up my friend you got to put it on so you got your deke on you got your kevlar sleeves and you really are kind of ready for kind of a Liberace thing in Vegas it's nice with a little Michael Jackson it's very impressive coming up we make our window and one that can weather a hurricane it really does hold

Channel: Floyd Glass & Window

Views: 2,485,630

Rating: 4.546597 out of 5

Keywords: Floyd

Id: IjNusHQOhTM

Length: 6min 38sec (398 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 22 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/Milkpoyle]

That's the lawyer from It's Always Sunny