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 and various alloy compositions. It has even proved possible to produce amorphous metal ("glassy metal") cores because the cooling rate achievable by this process can be of the order of 1,000,000 kelvins per second. Glass-coated wire receives all of its material properties from its microstructure. The microstructure in turn receives its properties from the rate at which the wire is cooled. The magnetic properties of glass-coated wires also differ greatly from the properties of amorphous wires and cold-drawn wires due to the difference of the internal stresses that are occurring in the wire. When choosing a metal for the wire