Prince Rupert's drop
glass object created by dripping molten glass into cold water
Prince Rupert's drops (also known as Dutch tears or Batavian tears) are toughened glass beads created by dripping molten glass into cold water, which causes the glass to solidify into a tadpole-shaped droplet with a long, thin tail. These droplets are characterized internally by very high residual stresses, which give rise to counter-intuitive properties such as the ability to withstand a blow from a hammer or a bullet on the bulbous end without breaking, while exhibiting explosive disintegration if the tail end is even slightly damaged. In nature, similar structures are produced under certain conditions in volcanic lava and are known as Pele's tears.
The drops are named after Prince Rupert of the Rhine, who brought examples of them to England in 1660, although they were reportedly being produced in the Netherlands earlier in the 17th century and had probably been known to glassmakers for much longer. They were studied as scientific curiosities by the Royal Society, and the unraveling of the principles of their unusual properties probably led to the development of the process for the production of toughened glass, which was patented in 1874. Research carried out in the 20th and 21st centuries shed further light on the reasons for the drops' counterintuitive properties.
Description
Prince Rupert's drops are produced by dropping molten glass drops into cold water. The glass rapidly cools and solidifies in the water from the outside inward. This thermal quenching may be described by means of a simplified model of a rapidly cooled sphere. Prince Rupert's drops have remained a scientific curiosity for nearly 400 years due to two unusual mechanical properties.
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This entry incorporates text from “Prince Rupert's drop” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.