4/14/15

Fiberglass Ice - An idea whose time had went.

Building materials. How to build them, right? In 1960, Professor W. David Kingery, who seems like one of those pretentious people who goes by their middle name and reduces their first name to an initial, was working on ways to use ice as a building material: some good, some bad. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe his first name was "Wabbajack". Hence, its demotion to an initial. Wait. What's that? I've just been told his first name was William. Well, he's not leaving us much choice. Pretention it is. Sorry, W. David. We don't make the rules.

As you can see in the article below, one of the reinforcing materials W. David found to mix into ice was sawdust. Neato! Even "better" than sawdust was fiberglass. Since this was the swinging we'll-worry-about-that-later Sixties, there's no mention of how you would clean up all the fiberglass floating around the polar ice caps once your art projects are all dismantled or melted. It's possible that was the very reason they didn't move forward with the idea. Let's hope so. Can you imagine the environmental mess we'd have now if they'd built entire military bases out of fiberglass ice? Melting ice caps are bad enough. Think of all the penguins and polar bears with chronically itchy skin.





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