I thought I had posted about this first video before but I can’t find it so I’m going to do it now as a prerequisite for the second video.
Now, see what happens when you shoot the head of a Prince Rupert’s Drop with a .22:
Here is a frame grab:
Now, the awesome video of a bullet shattering against a small piece of very special glass:
Jeff K. told me about the video at the match last Saturday. Then this morning gonxau (@gonxau) sent me a tweet about it. Thanks guys.
WOW!
Indeed. It’s fascinating to see the .22 bullet liquify when hitting the glass…
Clearly this has been studied, and generally played with, backwards and forwards for centuries (though I’d never heard of it until today), which begs the question; are there any practical applications for this state of glass? Or other materials similarly processed?
Also of note is the top-down, authoritarian, chain-of-command, command and control, royalist mindset which springs forth at the drop of a hat (or the breaking of a piece of glass), from the old English text (ubiquitous throughout Europe, and today largely infecting the American mind). No bloody wonder they lost the American Revolution. Same thing happened to the Germans in W.W. II; that concept was so deeply engrained in their skulls that the field commanders couldn’t act without orders from on high. Many of them waited, doing nothing during the initial assault on Normandy because Rommel was busy shopping or some such nonsense and wasn’t there to tell them what to do.
Is the hardening of steel by quenching then a similar phenomenon?
In steel it has more to do with changing the type of crystals which form. With glass it is about putting the exterior surface in compression.
I think way back when, which isn’t so way back, in a way, the royals and such wanted a monopoly on doing and understanding such interesting science and really resented the hoi polloi doing such fun things and figuring out why such things worked the way they did.
To be fair, though, you also have to remember that Hitler, in addition to being a dictator, was a short-tempered, paranoid micromanager who thought he knew better than just about everybody else in the entire Wehrmacht. It wasn’t just habit and culture – if they acted on their own in any major way and it didn’t turn out well, they risked being shot.
A top-down chain of command on steroids.
Tempered glass is strengthened by a similar idea. The outer layers are under compression while the internal volume is under tension, caused by chemical and physical processing of the glass.
Here is a video where they cause a sheet of tempered glass to shatter by hitting it with a small shock at the edge, the glass is very strong to impacts on the face.
Of all the stuff I watch on Youtube, I’ve only ever subscribed to two channels: both of his. You gotta love a guy who has a stockless 10-22 in a frame to shoot objects for high speed video. Even when it’s non-shooty, it’s always interesting.
Ouroboros