GLASS FRYING PAN

Wairarapa Times-Age, 22 August 1938, Page 8

GLASS FRYING PAN

WILL SOON BE IN GENERAL USE. The time is rapidly approaching when budgeting for a cocktail party will simply be a matter of estimating the cost of the food, liquor, service, and getting the carpet dry-cleaned afterwards. Glass breakage need not be included. Cocktail glasses will be made of genuine unbreakable glass, and “late afternoon party” hostesses will owe it largely to the obscure chemists of the German glass industry. The unbreakable cocktail glass is already a fact, -and should shortly be available everywhere. So is the glass frying pan and saucepan, oven, hot water tank, refrigeration coil, and a hundred other utensils commonly made of metal. The only drawback of glass, —its inability to withstand rapid changes of temperature —has yielded to the patient research of the scientist at last.

Glass is one of the oldest products of human ingenuity. Its history goes back to the Pharaohs of Egypt. But the technique of its manufacture is no longer confined to the old processes handed down through generations; blowing, grinding, etching, and so on. Today it is a product of the laboratory and the machine. It can be turned bn a lathe and milled like a metal. With modern machine tools it ,can be carved as wood was once carved. Which accounts for the fact that one can. buy “cut glass” goblets in 6d stores which fall very little short of “cut crystal” in beauty and do not fall short at all in utility. Glass can be produced today in every shade of colour known to science. Glass that will polarise light rays, which, fitted as a windscreen to a car, will prevent the driver being blinded, by the lights of oncoming cars or the rising or setting sun, is available. So is glass that will allow ultrared or ultra-violet rays to pass, and glass that will absorb them.