Architectural glass percent of the world's flat glass is produced by the float glass process invented in the 1950s by Sir Alastair Pilkington of Pilkington Glass, in which molten glass is poured onto one end of a molten tin bath. The glass floats on the tin, and levels out as it spreads along the bath, giving a smooth face to both sides. The glass cools and slowly solidifies as it travels over the molten tin and leaves the tin bath in a continuous ribbon. The glass is then annealed by cooling in an oven called a lehr. The finished product has near-perfect
Glass-coated wire or oil. However. there are some apparatuses that can bypass some of these problems by heating the glass and the metal in separate chambers which allows for the use of metals with high melting points. Around the 1950s the Taylor-Ulitovski process was changed to a continuous feeding process of the materials in order to make these wires on a mass production scale. Metal cores in the range 1 to 120 micrometres with a glass coating a few micrometres in diameter can be readily produced by this method. Glass-coated microwires successfully produced by this method include copper, silver, gold, iron, platinum,