The inventor of safety glass

Edouard Benedictus (1879-1930)

Edouard Benedictus was a historical French badass whose name I did not know until recently. Given that he was skilled as a chemist and painter as well as a bookbinder and fabric designer (interesting), I think he qualifies as a polymath. If your method of discovering the world is through Google, you would have likely seen no association with M. Benedictus apart from his paintings and design of patterns.

However, Benedictus was the accidental inventor of laminated glass in 1903. He dropped a flask whose interior had been stained with cellulose nitrate. When it fell to the floor, the flask did shatter, but it retained its structure because of the support provided from the plastic material. He was inspired by this incident to create a composite glass material in 1909, chiefly for safer automobiles. Its first widespread use was in goggles of gas masks during WWI, and it became widely adopted on automobiles in the 1930s. The design principle is a layer of plastic between two separate layers of glass, and some sort of heat treating.

It's not such a bad thing that today he is only known for his art, because it's not altogether unattractive. I am as far from an artist as any man but I do like his paintings. They have some kind of heady, idealized Art Deco style about them. I like that. I also like liberal use of warm colors and sharp contrasts that came in the 20th century; to me Impressionist art looks like someone's dunked it in a pond for a few hours. In the latter half of the 20th century art no longer seems approachable or digestible; artists are vain and seem unconcerned with how everyday people can understand their work.

Oh, sorry for the tangent. I found out about this man in searching online for who was responsible for the invention of laminated glass. Laminated glass saved my life earlier this year when driving a rental Hyundai Sonata in Tennessee. I was witness to spontaneous disintegration of an eighteen wheeler's tire, a piece of which bounced off the road surface and struck my windshield dead center. It punched a long slit-shaped hole into it, but I was hit with nothing but loose glass. My terrified dog, in a carrier on the passenger seat, escaped with some glass debris in his fur. The windshield shattered in the area of the impact, but because of the modern design of laminated glass, it buckled inwards noticeably because of the plastic sandwich construction. It's just conjecture, and maybe the size of the hole doesn't reflect it, but it was quite a big chunk of rubber that impacted the Hyundai, and I think it would have caused mortal injury if it had passed through the glass unmolested.

The ending was incredibly fortuitous, since the truck driver accepted responsibility and put me up for the night in a local hotel; his wife actually lived 30 miles away (how many truckers are ever in this situation) and she picked him up so he got to spend the night at home with his kids. I spoke with an insurance adjuster the next morning, but I lost no sleep over the crash since I had purchased Hertz's damage waiver and the issue was therefore between that company and the insurance company. Hertz dropped off another car the same morning and I was on the road with barely any time lost. Lovely! Thank you, Edouard Benedictus.