Automotive Industry Trends
July 2005
Automotive Glazing: Origins of the Art
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Automotive glazing is one of the quiet heroes of the automobile industry. The field encompasses the conceptualization, design, development, manufacture, and installation of vehicle windshields, windows, sunroofs, and other glass pieces, but seldom is it highlighted as a spectacular selling point on the showroom floor.
Like many forward-looking technologies, glazing came from humble beginnings. On Ford’s 1909 Model T, the windshield was optional. It was made of ordinary plate glass and measured about 37 inches across and 17 inches from top to bottom. For convenience, the glass was split lengthwise so that when the windshield was completely covered with mud and road debris, the top half could be folded down, allowing the driver to continue on his journey with an unobstructed view. The windshield later became standard, but it wasn’t until the introduction of the Model A in 1927 that the feature was made with safety glass.
Safety glass had been invented years earlier—and quite accidentally—in the laboratory of a young French scientist named Edouard Benedictus. In 1903, while working in his lab, Benedictus knocked a flask off a shelf. The flask hit the floor and broke, but it didn’t shatter. It retained its shape. The scientist was understandably puzzled. He examined the flask and realized that it had once held nitrocellulose, which had evaporated and left a transparent adhesive film on the inside surface. When the flask crashed to the floor, the glass splintered but the shards adhered to the film. Benedictus labeled the flask and put it back on the shelf, planning to return to it another day.
A short time later, Benedictus read a report in a Parisian newspaper that a young girl had died from injuries sustained from broken windshield glass as a result of an automobile crash. He returned to his lab, took down the flask, and worked into the night and on through the following day, bonding together two sheets of glass with a layer of liquid plastic, until he achieved the result he knew could save lives. He succeeded in patenting his laminated safety glass in 1909.
Automobile manufacturers were hesitant to embrace the new invention. At that time, it was critically important to reduce costs, and safety glass was still prohibitively expensive. However, during World War I, the military saw a justifiable application in the lenses of gas masks. Once it was proven that the benefits of laminated glass aligned with the added cost, auto makers began to include it as a standard feature, as with Ford’s Model A in the mid-1920s.
As the decades passed, auto designers sought rounded, modern aesthetics. In the 1950s, they developed models with curved one-piece windshields, a shift that made glazing not only a practical element of design, but also a distinctive artistic choice. Tempered glass (glass hardened by a process of rapid heating and cooling so that it breaks into pebble-sized bits) was used for side glazing and rear windows, but advances in the creation of laminated-glass windshields allowed car makers to put ever more unique faces on their products. Glazing serves in the dual roles of practicality and creativity to this day. It has made a quick transition in its century-long history from a whimsical option to a central component in the art and craft of auto manufacturing.