light made solid

In the stained glass industry, we all benefit from the invention of laminated glass, as does anyone who drives a car. Laminated glass is a film of plastic fused to two pieces of glass so that when it is impacted, the sheet retains it's shape and doesn't shatter. Anyone who survives a car accident does so because the wind shield glass doesn't become a thousand projectile shards. Countless churches are now covered with this type of glass, what is referred to as protective glazing. Edouard Benedictus (1878-1930) is the inventor of this material. Benedictus was a French painter, composer, writer, and chemist. He began in 1897 as a book binder, and then worked on the design of furnishing materials. He knew Ravel whose song Noel des jouets received its first performance at one of the Benedictus musical evenings. He was a very accomplished print maker with a large body of work. Here is a collection of some of his prints.

Here is a description of the invention and inventor from the site: users.wfu.edu

Edouard Benedictus is the man who discovered safety glass in 1903. He was a Renaissance-man of sorts, dabbling in various fields, and he was once described as "A man who knows no limits." He discovered safety glass in a very serendipitous manner: one day while tinkering in his lab, he knocked over a flask that was resting on his workbench. The flask fell to the ground and shattered, but retained most of its original shape. Benedictus was intrigued by this, so he picked up the flask and examined it. It had a film on the inside of the glass that was holding it together. It was revealed upon closer examination that this film was made up of collodion, a chemical commonly used to seal cuts closed. Benedictus made a note of this and then put the flask back on the shelf and went back to what he had been doing before, vowing that he would go look at it again later.


A few days later, Benedictus was reading the Paris newspaper when he came across an article detailing a car accident that had occurred the day before. A young girl had been killed by the broken windshield. Benedictus was shaken by this, but didn't really think too much of it. A few days after that, he read another story in the newspaper about another person dying because of the flying glass from a windshield. This time, however, he was struck by inspiration, and he quickly ran to his lab and began work on this first safety glass.

For twenty-four hours straight, he experimented with coating glass with liquid plastic, then shattering it. By the next evening, he had finally produced the first pane of what he called "Triplex" two panes of glass sandwiching a layer of collodion that stuck to both panes of glass. The "Triplex" made it so that there would not be any flying shards of glass when the glass was shattered; the glass would stick to the collodion and there would be a lot less injuries from car accidents.