Safety glass
glass with additional safety features that make it less likely to break
Safety glass is glass with additional safety features that make it less likely to break, or less likely to become a hazard when broken. Common designs include toughened glass (also known as tempered glass), laminated glass, and wire mesh glass (also known as wired glass). Toughened glass was invented in 1874 by Francois Barthelemy Alfred Royer de la Bastie. Wire mesh glass was invented in 1892 by Frank Shuman. Laminated glass was invented in 1903 by the French chemist Édouard Bénédictus (1878–1930).
These three approaches can easily be combined, allowing for the creation of glass that is at the same time toughened, laminated, and contains a wire mesh. However, combination of a wire mesh with other techniques is unusual, as it typically betrays their individual qualities. In many developed countries safety glass is part of the building regulations making properties safer.
Toughened glass
Toughened glass is processed by controlled thermal or chemical treatments to increase its strength compared with normal glass. Tempering, by design, creates balanced internal stresses which causes the glass sheet, when broken, to crumble into small granular chunks of similar size and shape instead of splintering into random, jagged shards.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Safety glass” as glass with additional safety features that make it less likely to break. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3346867. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1874, 1892, 1903 and 1878.
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This entry incorporates text from “Safety glass” 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.