Though the ancient Phoenicians, Egyptians and Greeks knew a way to melt glass and stretch it into thin fibers, it wasn’t till the Nineteen Thirties that the system advanced into business-scale production of non-stop fibers, which could later be used as structural reinforcements. Patent programs filed between 1933 and 1937 with the aid of Games Slayter, John Thomas and Dale Kleist, employees of Owens-Illinois Glass Co. (Toledo, Ohio), report the key developments that storefront signs step-modified the industry from generating discontinuous-fiber glass wool to making non-stop glass filaments with diameters as small as four microns (4 millionths of a meter) and heaps of ft long. Ensuing breakthroughs made the technique commercially possible and price-competitive.
The final patents from this collection, entitled “Textile Material” and “Glass Fabric,” foreshadowed the future of glass fiber as a fabric reinforcement. The patents had been provided in 1938, the same year that Owens-Illinois and Corning Glass Works (Corning, N.Y.) joined to shape Owens-Corning Fiberglas Corp. (OCF). The new agency marketed its glass fiber under the change call Fiberglas, which become the genesis of the common prevalent reference to fiberglass. It became not long earlier than some of different producers entered the marketplace and, through numerous system and product improvements, contributed to a global structural composite reinforcements marketplace, that in keeping with marketplace studies firm Lucintel (Dallas, Texas, U.S.), reached 2.5 billion pounds in 2018.