It’s 1960 and look how happy Sharon, and Karen, and Joey are.
And Bob has completely forgotten the horrors of the second World War.
They are happy because of this glass door.
But to understand doors like the ones sold here
you have to go to the patent application—
You know what?
Because when Admiral Richard Byrd went to Antarctica in 1939
Science News reported that he adorned his lab with
non-frosting window panes.
And newspapers around the country shared the picture.
But this technology had a far greater impact
than helping Arctic researchers study cute penguins.
A new type of window enabled everything
from paradisal patios to a change in skyscrapers
from ones that look like this to ones that look like this.
And in this case, the breakthrough had a name.
Thermopane changed Bob’s world.
I was just curious, what attracted you to write about this and research this topic?
When I've told people, oh yeah, I'm doing a research project on insulated glass.
You know, the response is always like, oh, what?
The reality is that it changed the way that we did building enclosures, radically and
in a very, very short period of time.
The way that the building interiors were illuminated for hundreds, thousands of years
was natural daylight.
Or, you know, you had to burn something basically to be able to see inside at night.
When electricity came along in the 1870s, 1880s, that changes the formula.
But not all the way, right.
Electricity is still expensive for decades.
And so you still have these very, very large windows to bring daylight
especially into offices.
One thing I was reminded of, I did this one little series
on old movie studios, like in the silent era.
And before they really got the lighting down
it's exactly what you're talking about because they all look like greenhouses.
Because they just have to adapt to the situation
of not being able to have powerful enoughlight.
That affects the architect’s aesthetic at the time, is what you're saying.
But there's a real environmental penalty there
because the glass is a pretty good insulator, but the problem is
that it has to be so thin to see through
that you lose all of the heat in the building during the winter
or you pick it all up in the summer.
So glass is both necessary, but also a problem.
As electricity got cheaper and more places started using heating and air conditioning
large windows kinda went out of style.
In 1931, the Chicago Tribune wrote about architects laughing at the idea of glass walls.
They were “not feasible” because glass was a “great conductor of heat and cold”.
But people still wanted to see outside.
Glass blocks like these were one solution - they insulated well.
As a plus, they offered privacy.
But you couldn’t see out them clearly like real windows.
So there has to be a wall
between Bob and his children.
Instead of watching them play
he’s forced to ponder the unspeakable things he did during the war.
But in 1934 Libby Owens Ford Glass Company
annnounced a new glass process they acquired
from a refrigeration engineer in Milwaukee.
This engineer realizes that if you can double the glass, right.
And between those two layers of glass,
take out all of the humid air and replace it with dry air with all the water taken out.
You can get not only the insulating value of the two pieces of glass
but that thin layer of air in between does a really, really good job
of preventing heat from jumping from one pane of glass to the next.
Builders are chasing something called R-value.
It’s a measure of insulation.
Higher = more insulation.
That pink insulation in your wall, it might have a really high R-value.
A pane of glass is down at 1.
Thermopane doubled that at more than 2 and it was still transparent.
Newspapers report that they extend the line and
soon that double pane glass was down in Antarctica.
And Thermopane salesmen were claiming Admiral Byrd said
it kept his lab 75 degrees Fahrenheit behind the windows.
Though the seal required some reworking over the next decade
thermopane changed the possibilities for architects.
Thermopane gets going, but then competitors do start up pretty quickly.
So it becomes a competitive marketplace for this type of dual system.
Pittsburgh plate glass, which is one of their big competitors
comes up with a slightly different way of doing it.
And so they patent that and they market it as “Twindow”
because it has two layers of glass.
I would say by the 1960s,
if you're putting a big window into any residential or office building
other than, a very, very temperate climate,
you're probably just doing insulated glass almost by default.
Today, you can find triple pane windows and thin glass coatings
like “Low-E Glass” that have advanced the same idea.
They can bump up that R-value to above 3.
At the same time, builders worry about all the glass walls
we’ll need to replace, often from seals that are breaking down.
But the Thermopane revolution really did change how people work and live.
The residential advertising through this
was always a sliding glass door, looking out onto very verdant landscape
which is basically saying, you know, here's a way of connecting
your inside world and your outside world.
I noticed this blanket of air phrase a couple of times.
Even though means very, very broad, wide open glass window
you're sort of cuddled up in a blanket.
"The family at home is enjoying the convenience and the functional beauty of walls of glass."
"Merging room with room, blending inside with outside."
Taking away the barrier between the inside and the outside
is kind of socially and culturally, what a lot of these
mid-century modern homes were all about.
Being able to see all of your stuff.
Thermopane was a way to stop staring at the past.
And start seeing the future.
I guess this is by Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company too.
Is that kind of a different category?
Spandrel usually refers to the solid panel between the transparent ones.
And it does two things.
It covers up the edge of the floor plate, which is usually
you know, thick and kind of sloppy concrete.
But for a long time — and this is a whole other rabbit hole —
but for a long time, these glass curtain walls
are running a foul of kind of old fashioned fire codes
that say it needs to have a three foot, usually three foot brick wall
between one window and the next, and so way they got around that, like behind the dark
green panels in this building,
there's probably a brick wall, but they're putting a piece of opaque glass
in front of it
to give you the illusion of an all glass facade
Right, which was surprisingly like a fairly common thing.