Glass Meets Plastic

Libbey-Owens-Ford Glass Co. of Toledo is a triple-threat firm on the technological front. Inventing, buying and licensing, it has diversified its flat-glass line into 14 types of product from curved ("invisible") show windows to "glastone" building bricks. But three-fifths of L-O-F's business is selling safety glass to the automobile industry, principally General Motors.

More fertile than L-O-F's own fertile laboratories are those of the spectacular plastics industry. Nine years ago Mellon Institute presented Toledo Scales Co. with a urea-formaldehyde resin which combined the best features of two earlier plastics, cellulose acetate (translucent, colorable) and phenolic resin (heat-resistant, hard). Toledo Scales formed Plaskon Co., Inc., began using its plastics to replace the porcelain-enameled iron housing of its scales. But Plaskon's uses multiplied like rabbits, soon invaded gardens sacred to glass. Transparent, less shatterable, more easily molded than glass, some plastics are already used for airplane windshields. Toledo Scales' big neighbor, L-O-F, feared automobile windows would be next.

Last week L-O-F President John David Biggers (famed unemployment census taker, now on the Defense Advisory Commission) met the threatened invasion head on. L-O-F bought out Toledo's 70% control of Plaskon for some $2,500,000, became the first glass company to enter the plastics field. When plastics automobile windows are built, L-O-F may well build them.

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