OT Tomorrow's World 1989 house of the future in 2020

Nope, hardly any houses end up arriving thru the atmosphere after being in orbit, Shirley.

yes, LG InstaView. Touted for energy saving by letting you see what's in the fridge without opening the door, at least the glass default to opaque does fit with that usage.

Bargain prices from £1600 to £7250.

It is incredibly difficult to make properly. Pure aerogel blocks are much more expensive than the "contains aerogel" blankets eg.

The thing you notice is the presenters enunciation. I can understand every word without needing subtitles. How backward they were, didn't they know how to mumble?

Andrew - sorry to tell you but the mullet is back in fashion

Possibly why its not widely used - it requires power to keep it clear.

Apparently it varies depending on the tech:

It would be interesting to pair it with a thin film (ie semi-transparent) solar cell - in a window that would provide enough power in the daytime to make it clear. It would also mean it would go opaque in the night time, which might be what you want in a commercial building.

Theo

But for thermal management of a building probably other glass coatings are more effective.

Why? None of the offices I've ever worked in worried about privacy at night. They did have blinds to block sunlight in the day.

Did you mean residential building?

It's hard to see the benefit over curtains.

One obvious benefit is that you just flick a switch to change its state and that can be automated and should last a lot longer than automated curtains and if say triple glazed may well be as good thermally. Not as cheap tho.

The only Tomorrow's World gadget I have ever (knowingly) bought was a tin opener that cut around the seam so you could replace the lid after use. This would have been in the early 70s and cost the princely sum of £1.25. It worked for a bit until the cutter blunted and hence stopped the lid from being removed at all. The cheap ones just use brute force to cut the metal so don't have to be sharp.

I also remember one where one of the male presenters jumped up and down on a car windscreen that was both toughened and laminated so it's strong enough to hold together and doesn't have sharp shards that scrape the skin off your face after you hit it and slide down. I don't know what happened to that; if you wear a seatbelt and have air bags you shouldn't hit the screen anyway.

Toughened and laminated mean it costs more. So that's the end of that.

Does it need to be toughened and laminated?

I thought I explained why it was desirable. Those were the reasons given in the programme.

Wouldn't being toughened mean that breaking would result in 10s of thousands of small cubes of glass, but laminating would ensure that they all stayed in place and you would both be prevented from seeing in front of you and from punching out a hole in the shattered windscreen to ensure vision until you could stop in a safe place?

I remember the days when you had to punch a hole though a shattered windscreen.

Yes I would have thought that a toughened and laminated windscreen would be the worst of both worlds: breaks into small chunks that make a semi-opaque screen, but you can't punch a hole through - a recipe for a driver hitting something as he becomes disorientated while he is trying to stop safely.

One of those things that has become all but obsolete - do any cars made in the last couple of decades have toughened ("small bits") windscreens? When wearing Polaroid sunglasses I'm not aware of coloured patterns on any of the windows of my car (made in 2008) - not even the side windows of the rear window.

I found out the hard way that although windscreens are laminated, sunroofs (certainly the one on my 1993 VW Golf) aren't always. I went out to my car one morning to go to work and found an acrid stink in the car, pale-blue liquid surrounding a mess of glass "pebbles" on the seats and floor, and a hole about 9 inches in the sunroof.

I deduced that a block of frozen ice from the toilet of a jet flying overhead (so frozen chemical plus wee) had fallen off and had landed on the sunroof, punching a hole in it. That was a nice little cleanup job :-(

I wonder whether a laminated sunroof would have prevented an ice-ball penetrating the plastic laminate, or whether a block of ice about 9 inches in diameter travelling at close to its terminal velocity would have been too much even for the plastic. How are laminated windscreens tested? What is the size/velocity of an object that the screen has to withstand. And is it measured (as for aircraft windows) by firing chickens (hopefully defrosted!) at it?

On ordinary toughened windscreens, probably from about the 960s onwards, the vision zone in front of the driver broke into larger pieces, so you retained enough vision to stop without having to punch a hole. Polarised sun glasses showed that as several vertical oval patches on the screen.