The Optical Glass Industry

Abstract

THE Daily Telegraph published in its issues of December 28 and 29 two articles on the optical glass industry in this country. In a leading article of January 6 it says that, as England gave her scientific experimenters no assistance, supremacy in this highly skilled industry passed over to Germany, the Government of which had had the insight and the foresight to gauge its actual and potential value. When war broke out in 1914 there was but one firm—Messrs. Chance Brothers and Co., Ltd.—manufacturing optical glass in the British Empire. The consequence was that during tle first year of the war our armies and our fleets could not be equipped with the optical glass required. Thanks to the brilliant research work of Sir Herbert Jackson and his colleagues on the Glass Research Committee of the Institute of Chemistry; to the investigations and work of Messrs. Chance Brothers; and, later, to the work done by the Derby Crown Glass Co., Ltd., by the end of the war British optical glass was as good as German, and was being produced in quantities sufficient to meet every demand. Messrs. Chance Brothers were manufacturing in one year optical glass sufficient to meet three years of the whole world's peace demand before the war. The Derby Crown Glass Co., which, before it was requested to do so by the Optical Munitions Department of the Ministry of Munitions, had not made an ounce of optical glass, is now producing some seventy or more different types and varieties “of a quality,” says Prof. Cheshire, “which challenges comparison with the best in the world.” Nor is this all. The establishment of the British Scientific Instrument Research Association, of the Department of Technical Optics at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, and of the Department of Glass Technology at the University of Sheffield, and the work of the National Physical Laboratory are all designed to consolidate and extend the ground gained, so that our manufacturers may keep in the front rank and not again allow themselves to be outstripped. But, the Daily Telegraph points out, the industry is again exposed to the full blast of German competition, more formidable now than ever because of the state of the German exchange. The editorial article in our contemporary concludes by endorsing the demand of the industry that the Government shall implement the verbal assurances given during the war, and, by a system of importation only under licence for a period of, say, seven years, enable this industry—“of all others a key industry”—to be safely tided over this abnormal period.