Fiberglass

Fiberglass emerged from an accident during the Great Depression, when Owens-Illinois Glass Company was searching for new markets. Engineer Russell Games Slayter was experimenting with ways to fuse colored trademarks onto glass bottles when he fed powdered glass into a flame. Instead of a fused coating, he got a heap of cottonlike fibers—an unintended result that would spawn an industry.

The adjacent possible for fiberglass had been forming since the 1893 World's Fair, where demonstrations showed that molten glass could be drawn into fibers. But these early fibers were coarse, expensive, and had no obvious application. Slayter's 1932 discovery, developed with colleagues Dale Kleist and Jack Thomas, found a method to mass-produce fine glass fibers economically.

The commercial potential was immediately apparent: glass fibers could provide thermal insulation without the fire risks of organic materials like cotton or wood shavings. In 1935, Slayter and Thomas convinced executives at Owens-Illinois and Corning Glass Works to form a joint venture. The resulting company, Owens-Corning Fiberglas Corporation, launched in October 1938 with Slayter as Vice President of Research and Development.

The U.S. Navy specified fiberglass as preferred thermal insulation for all new warships in 1939, providing the validation that accelerated commercial adoption. The material offered a compelling value proposition: it was fireproof, rot-proof, and didn't absorb moisture. Unlike asbestos, it didn't crumble into dangerous dust (though later research would reveal its own respiratory hazards).

Slayter secured over 100 patents spanning applications from agriculture to manufacturing to home construction. The material evolved from simple insulation into reinforcement for plastics, creating fiberglass-reinforced polymer composites that would eventually build boat hulls, car bodies, and aircraft components.

Often called 'the Father of Fiberglas,' Slayter was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2006 along with Kleist and Thomas. The iconic pink fiberglass insulation that fills millions of American attics traces directly to his accidental discovery of glass wool while trying to solve a completely different problem.