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Bob Crager
Bob Crager of Lewis Street Glass is a 26 year veteran in the glass business. Lewis Street Glass is a leading Wichita Glass company, serving the entire Wichita/Sedgwick County area since 1919. They do anything and everything having to do with glass, both residential and commercial. They also do Auto glass. They are located at 743 South Market, facing Kellogg on the South, and you can reach them by phone at (316) 263-8259. You can email Bob Crager at bcrager@lewisstreetglass.com
Glass
2007-09-01 09:59:00
Window & door glass, clearly a good thing!
That’s a good question, and, believe it or not, one we’ve heard before. For years people have looked at 12th century, medieval-glass windows, and due to the age of the glass, determined that the reason some panes are thicker at the bottom is that over time, gravity causes the glass to “flow” towards the bottom of the frame. Although glass may “flow” if heated to a high enough temperature, the idea that there would be any recognizable flow at room temperature after a few hundred years is completely and totally untrue. Physicists and others who have put this theory to the test say it would take millions, not just hundreds or thousands of years, for there to be any type of noticeable change in the physical properties of glass that is kept at room temperature or below. A study published in the American Journal of Physics went so far as to say that the period this phenomenon, glass flowing, would require is “well beyond the age of the universe.” So, the short answer to your question is no. That is not the answer to the why of how this strangeness occurred. The variations in thickness in these windows can, instead, be attributed to how they were originally manufactured. Apparently, and/or obviously, it wasn’t easy making truly flat plates of glass several centuries ago. Sometimes molten glass would be poured into molds. Other times glass blowers would make a sphere and then spin it vertically, very quickly, to flatten it out. Neither of these techniques, as you might imagine, resulted in perfectly flat panes of glass. Either way, it would make sense to us that a window maker, when finding that a piece of glass was not the same thickness all the way from one end to the other, would install the thicker end of the glass at the bottom of the frame, if for no other reason than appearance. In today’s world, glass is manufactured in very large factories to such wide ranging specifications that it’s just amazing, all the uses and applications that glass fills in our lives. We get to enjoy sunshine and light year round due to the manufacture of window and door glasses. The com mercial use of glass has expanded to the point that entire skyscraper type buildings have glass as one of their primary construction components. Glass has become one of the most important considerations when designing and building doors and windows for new homes and every kind of commercial building. We’re truly blessed by those pioneers in the glass making industry over the last few centuries, who came before us, and made our world a better place to live. Some information was researched on the world wide web...More next month…
 
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