Metal Makeover
Recasting metals as glass—for war and more
By Peter Weiss
Some of the brass directing U.S. Navy research funding appears to have gone off the deep end: The Navy has been sinking serious money into the possibility of building future warships out of glass. Since the late 19th century, shipbuilders have opted for metals, mainly various grades of steel. Yet recently, military agencies have spent tens of millions of dollars on the concept of boats with glass hulls. As fractured as the idea may seem, it just might make maritime history.
There’s no plan to abandon the tried-and-true building of iron-sided ships. In fact, the new glass-bottomed boats being considered actually would be made of a kind of steel. That’s because under certain conditions, a metal’s orderly crystalline structure can be transformed into a hodge-podge of atoms that typifies glasses. In other words, the material becomes an amorphous or glassy metal, which can have remarkable strength or other desirable properties.