If Only …

Bill Bryson, author of A Short History of Nearly Everything and A Walk in the Woods, once wrote: “Among the many thousands of things that I have never been able to understand, one in particular stands out. That is the question of who was the first person who stood by a pile of sand and said, ‘You know, I bet if we took some of this and mixed it with a little potash and heated it, we could make a material that would be solid and yet transparent. We could call it glass.’ Call me obtuse, but you could stand me on a beach till the end of time and never would it occur to me to try to make it into windows.”

Well, Bryson, my amazement doesn’t stop there. With the wide variety of glass products now available, it’s amazing to think that product engineers are able to look at a perfectly useful window and say to themselves, “Sure, this is great, but what if it were also able to—” thus inspiring a future winner of the USGlass Product of the Year award.

Just this weekend I was discussing the wild options available for residential windows. My mom mentioned during a phone call that she would be replacing the windows in her living room. The room has a shaded view of Hampton Creek and while during the summertime the river breeze cools most of the house, the winter heating bills can be painful. We discussed some of the options that are now available to help keep the heat in and the frosty weather out.

“Now if only I could find a window that would clean itself,” my mom sighed before we said goodbye.

“Actually,” I couldn’t help but add, “there are self-cleaning glass products now on the market.”

Maybe this option isn’t right for my mom now, but it might be someday. And surely you engineers out there who work on a somewhat larger scope than my Mom’s ranch house also begin your designs for the next breakthrough in glass products with the simple words “if only.”

You can think of our Product of the Year awards as a tribute to the ingenuity that follows those words, “if only.” This spotlight isn’t just a tribute to the exciting advances in our industry over the course of the last year, but also an indication of the direction new products in the year ahead may take us. So keep an eye on your inbox for our upcoming survey for the 2007 Product of the Year, and be sure to cast your vote.