You might not bonk it by name , but opportunity are you have a Pyrex sweetheart in your kitchen right now — most Americans in all probability do . Afascinating chronicle over at collector Weeklytraces the omnipresent supermaterial as part of anexhibitionwhich open up this hebdomad at the Corning Museum of Glass .
Pyrex was forge in 1915 after the railroad diligence came to Corning Glass Works asking for aid design new signal lantern ; the exist silicate glass ones had a tendency to shatter due to temperature variations . The scientists purport using boron in the glass due to its nuclear properties — it did n’t flesh out and contract as much as conventional glass did when heat and cooled . The borosilicate glass was named Nonex or CNX ( Corning Non - Expansion ) , and then Corning finally lead off producing domesticated cooking utensil under the name Pyrex .
It was such a novel concept to Americans that all the selling for Pyrex had to introduce the idea of “ falsify in glass . ”
Pyrex specially took off during World Wars I and II due to the need to preserve metal for military mathematical process . It was considered to be a loyal move to switch from conventional cookware for example , to Pyrex . But Pyrex also got a freehanded nod when it was used in an significant astronomy lotion — a mirror for a telescope that was two times bigger than anything else on the planet :
The Pyrex name got a major packaging boost beginning in 1929 , when astronomer George Ellery Hale commissioned Corning to produce a 200 - column inch glass disk ( virtually 17 foot ) for a vast new scope in California — twice the diameter of the largest exist telescopic mirror at the fourth dimension . Manufacturing such disk require specialized materials and extreme precision , for if the glass expanded and press raggedly , its imagery would forever be warp . corn physicist Dr. George V. McCauley designed a mammoth disk for Hale using the Pyrex borosilicate formula and incorporating a complex honeycomb surface pattern to lighten the object ’s exercising weight .
Though an initial attempt at the 200 - in disk fail , McCauley ’s team successfully fill out the project in December of 1934 , after which the phonograph record was step by step cooled for 10 month through a process know as “ annealing . ” one thousand of people flocked to railway system lines as the jumbo Pyrex merchant marine crate have a bun in the oven the genus Lens made its mode from New York to California , where it would be cautiously ground , svelte , and finally installed in 1948 .
The full account will give you newfangled appreciation for the whimsically patterned cookware you see next prison term you ’re at the flea marketplace — or for the useful measuring cup that ’s credibly already in your kitchen locker .
[ Collectors Weekly ]
Images byCorning Museum of GlassviaCollectors Weekly
AstronomyCookingcorningkitchensTelescopes
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