History

no one knew who the glass designers were because in the GDR they valued the collective over the contributions of the individual

Total projection, nowadays for the most part you don't know who designed anything because the company owns the design.

i'm p sure germany had "unbreakable" glasses before/during the war too, cos my great grandma was given one (by allied soldiers who presumably looted it from a germany factory, but idk) when she was liberated from the camps, and brought it home through war torn central europe. eventually, my mother inherited it and i drank from it through my entire childhood. i even dropped it on a tile floor once or twice. it just bounced.

my mother still has it, it's still as good as it ever was.

it doesnt look like the ones in this article, so there must have been multiple manufacturers of durable glassware. or so i assume.

The actual science bit:

Glass Structure Research at the Central Institute for Inorganic Chemistry near Dresden. The material scientists there knew that when glass breaks, it is typically due to microscopic cracks in the material’s surface which form during the production process. Dramatically increasing the toughness of the glass surface was possible, they found, by replacing the smaller sodium ions in the glass with electronically charged potassium ions. Potassium ions need more space, pressing harder against neighbouring atoms and building up more tension that needs to be overcome for the microscopic cracks to get bigger.

The new crowd funded version: https://www.soulbottles.de/en Now with "everyone loves tap water!" in it

stalin shouldn't have stopped at berlin

I've got the best, free, 'unbreakable', cup right here.

such high quality it was deemed “unmarketable” because retailers wouldn’t have more repeat purchases of people who broke their glasses.

Feel like hey Arnold touched on the concept(albeit with neo liberal framing) in the watch episode with Gerald.

We've had unbreakable glasses since the 1960's, eh. Materials science figured it out courtesy of needing such material for the Space Race.