Mass-produced glass fibre began with an accidental blast of air
In 1932 Games Slayter, a researcher at Owens-Illinois, aimed compressed air at a stream of molten glass and found he had made fibres. That accident launched mass production of glass strands, and once the fibres were combined with plastic resin, fiberglass became a material stronger than many metals by weight.
Glass fibres were not new; people had made them for centuries, and the Prussian inventor Hermann Hammesfahr received the earliest patent, in the United States, in 1880. Slayter's method was patented from 1933, and after Owens teamed up with Corning in 1935 the new company sold Fiberglas, with one s, from 1936. At first it was fluffy glass wool, full of trapped gas and prized as heat insulation. That same year DuPont developed a resin to bind fibres into a composite, and Cyanamid's 1942 resin became the ancestor of modern polyesters. Replacing the gas with plastic sacrificed insulation but produced a strong structural material.
Early experiments came quickly. Ray Greene of Owens Corning built a composite boat in 1937 but found the plastic too brittle, and the first car with a fiberglass body, a 1946 Stout Scarab prototype, never reached production. In the Second World War the material replaced moulded plywood in aircraft radomes because microwaves pass through it. Boats and sports car bodies became its first big civilian markets in the 1950s.
Manufacturing starts in furnaces that melt silica sand, limestone, kaolin and other minerals, which are then forced through tiny holes a few micrometres across. The filaments are coated so they bond to the resin and do not slip, then bundled into rovings. Each fibre is strong along its length but weak across it and buckles easily because it is so thin, so designers stack layers at different angles and let the plastic lock the fibres in place. Resins shrink as they cure, polyester by 5 to 6 percent and epoxy by about 2, which can warp parts days or weeks later.
Cheaper and more flexible than carbon fiber, fiberglass does not conduct electricity, is not magnetic and resists many chemicals. It turns up in surfboards, hot tubs, pipes, roofing and orthopaedic casts.
Source: Fiberglass
