The Importance of Glass

I guess the glass property I'm most impressed with is the transparency of the glass in optical fiber.

"For multimode fiber, the loss is about 3 dB per km for 850 nm sources, 1 dB per km for 1300 nm"

https://www.thefoa.org/tech/loss-est.htm

Imagine a window 1 kilometer thick with hardly any perceptible loss!

If you are ever in the Southern Tier, the Corning Museum of Glass is worth a visit:

https://home.cmog.org/

They mentioned that to make glass, it must be cooled rapidly so crystals don't have time to form. A number of complex alloys of metals mixed with some non-metals like silica, can be cooled at a rate as high as 2E6 F degrees per second from molten to near room temperature to form metallic glass.

This material is electrically conductive, like metal, but is relatively brittle, and has a very low coefficient of thermal expansion, like glass.

One of its uses is as a brazing material used to join parts that must withstand the temperatures inside jet engines.

As an example Harvester Silos (big blue silos which dominated the the United States farm skyline in the 70’s and 80’s) used that technology of glass fused to metal that initially started to store feedstuffs on farms.

At one time they did post how it’s made and it was interested. But now it’s limited.

Those silos use a totally different process: they are coating steel with glass. In the material I'm referring to, the metal itself IS glass (amorphous[non-crystaline]).

One source is https://metglas.com/company-products-and-services/.