A brief history of Fiberglass

Fiberglass or Fibreglass, which is the same thing really, is today a commonly used industry fiber reinforced plastic that is made using glass fiber. Now, you may be wondering why glass fibers are used to make this special kind of plastic. This is because it gives numerous benefits, even more than plastics and metals. The glass fibers are arranged randomly and flattened to a sheet, or even woven as a fabric as required. Thus, the material is quite versatile, much more than normal glass, plastic and metals. The plastic matrix of the fiberglass can actually be a thermostat polymer matrix that is made from epoxy, vinylester and polyester resin that are thermosetting polymers. 

Here are some of the benefits in short. These are more flexible and cheaper than carbon fiber. This means that these can be molded into many kinds of products more easily than carbon fibers and metals. Secondly, it is stronger than metals by weight and unlike metals it can be molded into various complex shapes. For these reasons, and more, these are now used for making various things and infrastructure such as hot tubs, water tanks, swimming pools, septic tanks, casts, roofing, cladding, pipes, surfboards and more. Fiberglass is one of the many non conductive materials from Alberta

Fiberglass is also known as glass-reinforced plastic or GRP or glass fiber reinforced plastic. Since glass fiber is also called fiberglass, its composites are also known as fiberglass reinforced plastic.

Now that we know a bit of background about the item, let us go back a bit and know about its history.

According to history, glass fibers have been used for centuries. However, Hermann Hammesfahr who was a Prussian inventor in the 1880 in the USA patented glass fiber. Games Slayter accidentally discovered the mass production of glass strands. Slayer was a researcher at the Owens-Illinois. He introduced jets of compressed air into a stream of molten glass, producing glass fibers. For this method, the patent was given in 1933 and was used for a long time. This method was first used by the Owens Corning company which used the method to produce the very first commercially and mass produced fiberglass. They called their product the “Fiberglas”. At first, fiberglass was just glass wool, which was gas entrapped with fibers. This made the glass wool great as insulators and for use in high temperatures.

The first modern fiberglass polyester resin was made in 1942 by the name of Cyanamid. Today, you can get several high quality Fiberglass telecom products in Alberta.