I spent the day hauling rolls of old, dusty, debris-filled fiberglass insulation I bundled up a couple of weeks ago down from the attic to clean up the space after the recent roof renovation and make room for a fresh layer of insulation.
I plan to reuse the old fiberglass to line the edges of the attic after the new insulation is in place. In the meantime, I am storing the used insulation in an empty storage room attached to the house.
The job would not have been a big deal if the material had been wood, steel, concrete, or even cannonballs made of lead; however, the job required working with fiberglass, which is never pleasant, as anyone who has worked with the awful stuff knows full well.
After having spent the day inhaling what seemed a lifetime’s worth of glass fibers and dust (despite the respirator strapped to my face), I began to wonder what sort of characters invented this most ungodly of construction materials. My curiosity led me to a blog page called The History of Fiberglass.
I quickly learned that the creation of delicate glass fibers dates back to the ancients (think Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Greeks); however, the world had to wait until 1880 for the first fiberglass production patent, issued to a Mr. Hermann Hammesfahr—a terrifyingly Teutonic name if there ever was one! Herr Hammesfahr created cloth woven from glass fibers and silk, but the innovation stagnated.
The sort of glass fibers that eventually made their way into insulation did not appear until a half-century later. As is the case with many inventions, fiberglass was an accidental discovery rather than a targeted innovation, as The History of Fiberglass explains:
Games Slayter, an engineer at the company, was working on ways to produce glass fibers as a strategy for finding new markets for glass.
Another employee at Owens-Illinois, Dale Kleist, was experimenting with fusing glass blocks using molten glass sprayed out of a gun originally designed for spraying molten bronze. When he attempted to spray the glass, however, the gun emitted instead a shower of fine glass strands. Slayter immediately saw the potential of this accidental discovery and honed the process of producing large quantities of glass fiber efficiently and cheaply, which was patented in 1933.
The first product Slayter made with these new glass fibers was an air filter, which went on the market in 1932. This was to be the first commercially successful product made of glass fiber.
At the same time, Corning Glass of New York was also working on methods of producing glass fibers. The company approached Owens-Illinois to collaborate on research. In 1938, these companies formed the Owens-Corning Fiberglas Company (their name for the product had only one ‘s’), which continued to perfect techniques of industrial glass fiber production.
And here we are, nearly a century later, still waiting for someone to discover how to make fiberglass insulation a more pleasant material to work with!
I plan to reuse the old fiberglass to line the edges of the attic after the new insulation is in place. In the meantime, I am storing the used insulation in an empty storage room attached to the house.
The job would not have been a big deal if the material had been wood, steel, concrete, or even cannonballs made of lead; however, the job required working with fiberglass, which is never pleasant, as anyone who has worked with the awful stuff knows full well.
After having spent the day inhaling what seemed a lifetime’s worth of glass fibers and dust (despite the respirator strapped to my face), I began to wonder what sort of characters invented this most ungodly of construction materials. My curiosity led me to a blog page called The History of Fiberglass.
I quickly learned that the creation of delicate glass fibers dates back to the ancients (think Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Greeks); however, the world had to wait until 1880 for the first fiberglass production patent, issued to a Mr. Hermann Hammesfahr—a terrifyingly Teutonic name if there ever was one! Herr Hammesfahr created cloth woven from glass fibers and silk, but the innovation stagnated.
The sort of glass fibers that eventually made their way into insulation did not appear until a half-century later. As is the case with many inventions, fiberglass was an accidental discovery rather than a targeted innovation, as The History of Fiberglass explains:
Games Slayter, an engineer at the company, was working on ways to produce glass fibers as a strategy for finding new markets for glass.
Another employee at Owens-Illinois, Dale Kleist, was experimenting with fusing glass blocks using molten glass sprayed out of a gun originally designed for spraying molten bronze. When he attempted to spray the glass, however, the gun emitted instead a shower of fine glass strands. Slayter immediately saw the potential of this accidental discovery and honed the process of producing large quantities of glass fiber efficiently and cheaply, which was patented in 1933.
The first product Slayter made with these new glass fibers was an air filter, which went on the market in 1932. This was to be the first commercially successful product made of glass fiber.
At the same time, Corning Glass of New York was also working on methods of producing glass fibers. The company approached Owens-Illinois to collaborate on research. In 1938, these companies formed the Owens-Corning Fiberglas Company (their name for the product had only one ‘s’), which continued to perfect techniques of industrial glass fiber production.
And here we are, nearly a century later, still waiting for someone to discover how to make fiberglass insulation a more pleasant material to work with!
RSS Feed
