Originally published at: Communist shatterproof drinking glasses make a comeback - Boing Boing
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I’ve seen that many times. A brand new beer bottle will frequently bounce rather than break, but might not survive the second bounce.
A whole spilled forklift pallet of them skittering across a tile floor is quite something!
eta:
Hm, that would be 9 cases of 24s per level, 8 levels high, or 1,728 bottles, yikes!
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(lacking a banana for scale) that’s a rather small glass, assuming “cl” is centiliter
(4 cl → 1.4 floz → 2.7 tablespoon → 0.9 jigger for us backward imperial measures folk)
one swallow of Vodka perhaps?
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“Compared to plastic, glass is a material that can be recycled almost as often as you like,” says Steve Köhler, who organised Soulbottles’ crowdfunding campaign. “It is tasteless and transparent, and it has only one disadvantage: it breaks.”
Is it not also heavier, thus requiring more fuel to transport?
Or more likely Schnapps. But Superfest made lots of types of glasses, from beer pints to wine glasses to even scientific glassware. They go for insane prices on eBay.
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Is Russia, is that even possible??
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Well, each drink has to start somewhere right?
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i was thinking it was a shotglass, no?
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So, for drinking glasses, is there any benefit to borosilicate over tempered soda-lime? I thought the benefit of the former is primarily in the realm of temperature shocks.
Duralex is a longstanding brand of tempered drinkware that’s available now. They also have borosilicate bakeware
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Came to mention them. We had them growing up in the 80s. Dropped and bounced so many times. Amazing.
The one time I managed to break one: I took a glass from a freshly-finished dishwasher cycle (hot) and poured milk into it, straight from the fridge (cold). The glass burst in large chunks around my hand, but I wasn’t cut. Milk ran all over the floor, and the cat appeared out of nowhere. An exciting moment all 'round!
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Bioplastic reformulation plants aren’t that heavy, but they’re made of glass. Heh heh.
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I remember seeing an article about these a while ago
A forgotten product: The glass that was almost indestructable | by Florian Vick | Medium
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If I recall correctly, Superfest used a sode-lime glass that was, once molded, submersed in a chemical bath (IIRC potassium alkali) that replaces the sodium ions by potassium ions, making it much stronger.
The process is similar to Corning’s Gorilla Glass.
IDK why Soulbottle is mentioning alumino and borosilicate glass because IIRC superfest did not need special glass to work, and I think it would probably affect the doping process. 
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Do these suffer the same fate as the lab demo’s “hammer a nail into wood with the flask, destroy the flask with a nail dropped into the flask?”
Regardless, surfaces (material interfaces) are cool, and more or less disregarded. “nano” and similar trends over the last decade or so perhaps brings more into the surface-aware club.
And I’d love a few original versions of this glass!
My glass artist friends complain bitterly about lousy annealing in commercially available glass products. It has changed the public perception of the potential durability of glass.
In my early attempts at glass blowing, I cranked out a few really thick glasses. A friend’s kids have been dropping a couple of those on the floor for several years now. They are properly annealed. I’m sure they’ll break some day from the stresses built up by the shock of hitting the ground, but they haven’t yet.
I’ll ask if chemical strengthening is used in art glass.
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IIRC the problem with Superfest is when it breaks - it really breaks - exploding into lots of tiny razor sharp fragments; whereas many toughened glasses - don’t.
Nice idea though, but good luck in a world of cheap as chips IKEA glasses that are good enough for most uses and easy to replace and recycle when they become too scratched or chipped.
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From the actual article linked to in the blog post:
The material scientists there knew that when glass breaks, it is typically due to microscopic cracks in the material’s surface which form during the production process. Dramatically increasing the toughness of the glass surface was possible, they found, by replacing the smaller sodium ions in the glass with electronically charged potassium ions. Potassium ions need more space, pressing harder against neighbouring atoms and building up more tension that needs to be overcome for the microscopic cracks to get bigger.
But it has shades of The Man in the White Suit (apart from the disintegrating part at the end) - basically, it was too good and lasted too long for the economics of the standard glass makers.
But the main reason for its decline, paradoxically, was its strength. Glass retailers who play by the rules of the market live off the fact that their products break, so they can sell more. A glass that didn’t break was a threat to profits. “It turned out that Superfest is not suited for the market,” says Höhne. “The glasses are too good for pure market thinking.”
“Pure market thinking” - AKA why we can’t have nice things.
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Unfortunately, medium wanted me to register to read the article, so I was not able to read anything apart from the two first paragraphs.
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No idea about that. (What’s ‘medium’ got to do with it? Whatever that is.)
The link goes straight to The Guardian. (Well, it does for me.)
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This article:
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