Who invented fiberglass insulation

He decided to try a metal-spraying gun, the kind used to melt bronze and blow it onto baby shoes. He filled the gun with molten glass instead of bronze and discovered that it created a shower of ultrafine, threadlike glass fibers. Thomas and Slayter immediately recognized that this was an excellent way to make glass wool for insulation and that it might be adaptable for other glass-fiber applications.

The cloth was remarkably strong, and it could be cut and folded just like ordinary fabrics. As it happened, Corning Glass, in upstate New York, had also been experimenting with producing glass fibers for insulation, and in the company suggested to Owens-Illinois that they work together. They did, and the joint venture led to the creation of an independent firm, the Owens-Corning Fiberglas Corporation, in Corning supplied most of the basic research, while Owens-Illinois contributed most of the manufacturing know-how.

Owens-Corning set up its first manufacturing plant in Newark, Ohio, near the home office in Toledo. Owens-Corning spent millions of dollars learning how to manufacture fiberglass in commercial quantities. The basic procedure, still in use today, begins with marbles of raw glass. Using marbles has two purposes: First, they can be added to the melt at a controlled rate, which helps keep the temperature inside the reservoir of melted glass constant; and second, transparent marbles can easily be inspected for impurities.

The sliver is fed onto a spool, and from there it can be put through conventional textile processes, such as twisting or plying, and woven into cloth.

A different process is employed to make short, noncontinuous strands. It uses a bushing with wider holes, which the molten glass passes through by gravity. As the strands emerge, high-pressure steam or compressed air is blown on them Owens-Corning consulted the rocket pioneer Robert Goddard on the original design of the steam nozzles , yielding an explosion of tiny glass strands 8 to 15 inches long and about millionths of an inch thick.

They drop down to a conveyor belt and are collected for use in batts, rolls, or blankets. In many ways, fiberglass acts like regular glass. By Owens-Corning had managed to produce a glass-wool insulation that was less expensive than mineral wool or rock wool , the most popular insulating material of the time, which is made by blowing steam through molten stone.

In the U. Navy specified fiberglass as the preferred thermal insulation for all new warships. Yet even greater things were in store. Slayter and his team had also discovered that fiberglass embedded in various hardening resins could form a rigid, tough, lightweight, easily molded material that could replace plywood and sheet metal. In somewhat confusing fashion, this material is also commonly called fiberglass, though it is more accurately known as fiberglass-reinforced plastic, or FRP.

Tests showed that the tensile strength of FRP, whether reinforced with woven cloth, mat compressed short fibers , or rovings, was greater than that of most metals. The company developed a lightweight, FRP-encased wooden board to replace aluminum for the interior paneling of ships. This freed up aluminum for other uses, notably in aircraft.

And while the technology of molding the substitute into complex shapes was far from ready for mass production, a few military airplanes were made with experimental FRP components. A helpful advance in FRP molding came in , when American Cyanamid introduced a polyester formulation called Laminac, a two-part resin that used a hardener and an accelerator and was cured at room temperature.

This and other polyester resins made the FRP lamination process faster and easier, since high temperatures and pressures were not required, although both resin and fibers remained expensive. By the fiberglass industry was producing 3. After the war virtually every industry in North America rushed to find uses for fiberglass. One of the earliest and most successful was the FRP fishing rod.

Another was pleasure boats. From time immemorial most pleasure craft had been made of wood. And from time immemorial their hulls had tended to warp, leak, shed paint, and attract worms, bacteria, fungi, and barnacles. Making boats out of FRP eliminated all these problems. The son of a chemist, with graduate degrees from Ohio State in industrial and mechanical engineering, Greene had put himself through college by building and selling small wooden sailboats.

But his dream was to build a pleasure craft from plastic. In he began experimenting with scale-model hulls made of melamine and urea formaldehyde plastic resins. Since these were brittle, he tried to reinforce them with materials ranging from canvas fabric to wire window screening. When Owens-Corning began releasing fiberglass cloth for nonmilitary use in , Greene managed to buy half the initial run.

He made a new batch of model boats reinforced with fiberglass. The experiments proved so encouraging that he decided to build a full-sized hull. The challenge was to make an autoclave big enough to heat-cure a small dinghy. Despite wartime restrictions, he managed to get hold of about a gallon. Greene soaked fiberglass cloth in the resin and used it successfully to make a small, seamless hull. A number of other boatbuilders did the same thing. One typical mistake occurred at a small company in the Bronx that the Navy commissioned to make an FRP dinghy for coastal use.

The craftsmen fashioned a wooden mold, laid in the resin-soaked glass cloth, and let it cure. No one knew that the process needed a release agent. The dinghy became one big lump of solidified resin, stuck irretrievably to its mold. The workers gave up and eventually tossed the whole mess into the Harlem River. Meanwhile, with civilian automobile production shut down for the duration, carmakers also looked forward to the post-war use of FRP.

One of its earliest proponents was a farsighted engineer named William B. Stout, of Dearborn, Michigan. He had built his first aerodynamic, rear-engine Stout Scarab car in With its roomy interior, movable seats, folding table, and six-foot sofa, the Scarab was more like a contemporary minivan than a car.

Stout improved the Scarab in , giving it 55 square feet of floor space, twice that of the typical car. Even the chassis was made of FRP. The only metal components were the door hinges, latches, lamp bezels, engine mounts, and suspension parts. The Scarab body consisted of 13 large FRP pieces. When the pellets dropped to the ground, the tails broke off and were suctioned into a chamber where workers forked them up like hay and packed them into bags for shipping.

A new type of fiber insulation appeared in the s. At Corning Glass in , researcher Dale Kleist was trying to join glass blocks together to create transparent, weatherproof walls. During an unsuccessful attempt to use glass as a sealant, a stream of compressed air hit the flow of molten glass, forming a spray of tiny fibers. This fortunate accident led to a patent for Fiberglas. Corning Glass soon joined with Owens-Illinois, another glass manufacturer, to found a new company dedicated to the product.

Fiberglas was economical and easy to produce in large quantities. The company also spun Fiberglas into thread, wove it to make cloth, and blew it into light, puffy insulation. The open-plan, air-conditioned homes popular in the s could benefit from draperies, window screens, wall paneling, ceiling tiles, and insulation, all made from or with Fiberglas.

Owens Corning soon faced competition from other fiberglass manufacturers. Introduced in , the bright pink color became such a powerful marketing tool that the company trademarked it in The corporation even adopted the Pink Panther as a mascot in In Herman Hammesfahr was awarded a patent for a type of fiberglass cloth.

This fiberglass cloth had silk interwoven with it. It was both durable and flame retardent. The first glass fibers of the type that we know today as fiberglass were made through an accident, as many advancements in science have been.

Dale Kleist, a young researcher for Corning Glass had been attempting to weld two glass blocks together to form an airtight seal. Unexpectedly, a jet of compressed air hit a stream of the molten glass and created a shower of glass fibers, showing Dale an easy method to create fiberglass.

In , Corning Glass joined with Owens-Illinois, another company that had been experimenting with fiberglass, to develop the product further.

In , they patented the product "Fiberglas", with only 1 "s. In , experiments progressed with heat cleaning and treating Fiberglas cloth. The heat treatment gave the cloth more flexibility, and proved to be key in making Fiberglas fibers suitable for use as reinforcements in plastic laminates.