One of the most important materials in interior design and architecture is laminated, toughened structural glass, and its development was the result of a remarkable moment of good fortune and exceptionally good timing.
So much of the modern world relies on strong glass, from windscreens that help protect vehicle drivers and passengers from head-on collisions to walk-on glass so strong those same vehicles can drive across bridges made from them without incident.
From allowing more effective daylighting in homes, offices and shops to providing an aesthetic architectural flourish, super-strong glass is particularly important, but it is also potentially the product of one of the happiest accidents of the 20th century.
Broken But Not Shattered
In 1903, a young chemist, artist and composer by the name of Edouard Benedictus was working on many different experiments at once, including one which was exploring the properties of cellulose nitrate.
For reasons that have been lost to time, a glass flask was knocked onto the floor, but whilst the glass broke as would be expected for relatively thin and brittle sheets of the time, it did not shatter into pieces across his laboratory floor.
After investigating why it had managed to survive the accident, he found that at one point it had become coated with cellulose nitrate, an ingredient in gunpowder that was the foundation of many early plastic materials.
Whilst he did not initially explore it further, a far more serious accident would inspire him to take action.
A Painter Turned Saviour
At some point before 1909, Mr Benedictus read a news story about a car crash involving a driver and passenger who were severely injured in a car accident due to the sharp shards of broken windscreen glass.
Moved by the story, he took out a patent for a type of laminated glass consisting of two glass sheets bonded together by celluloid, with the hope that in an accident the windscreen would hold its shape and thus not cause any further injuries.
Exactly when he made this discovery and when he started to produce laminated glass is unclear, but what is known is that he has saved countless lives in car accidents and advanced the cause of modernist architecture, a design movement that had for intents and purposes not even been invented.
When Was It Finally Used?
It was initially used in the eye-pieces of gas masks once poison gas became a major weapon of war, but it would take a decade for it to be widely adopted in either architecture or motoring.
The biggest reason for this is that it was slow to produce and somewhat expensive initially, and the mindset of manufacturers was that it was up to drivers to keep themselves safe rather than their responsibility to make cars that would minimise the risk of serious injury.
The turning point was the case of Pane v Ford, where a driver seriously injured in a car accident sued the car manufacturer for negligence.
Whilst Mr Pane would ultimately lose the case, Ford would be influenced by both this case and an accident involving his close friend to make safety glass standard issue on all of his cars by the 1920s.