Two remarks:
"extra-ordinary professor" is roughly the same as a "associate professor" – an ordinary professor is a tenured one (roughly). So no wonder Prof. Liebig wasn't happy about it.
They should have mentioned the Superfest glass (also referred to as CV-Glas or Ceverit) made in East Germany. It's still mindblowing it's not made anymore. I hope someone is eventually picking this up again.
Superfest was a brand of ion-exchange toughened drinking glasses. Ion-exchange toughened glass was invented by Steven Kistler in the 1960s, and commercialised by Corning shortly after.
Gorilla Glass is essentially the same thing, and it (or similar products from other manufacturers) is on nearly every smartphone and tablet sold today, so in some sense it's more widespread than it has ever been.
Another reason it might not have caught on for drinking glasses is (aside from being much more expensive to produce), when it breaks it shatters into a huge number of _sharp_ shards, whereas tempered glass shatters into mostly blunter cubes. You can get tempered glass drinking glasses at IKEA.
I’d pay more for drinking glasses that break far less often. The sharp shards are ok - have to clean up anyway.
I would encourage anyone who hasn’t to try and see a glassblowing demonstration. It’s about as different from programming as any creative process could be - real time, intuitive, working with an unstable material - but something in it really spoke to me.
The Chrysler museum in Norfolk VA has amazing free demonstrations almost every day which are amazing if anyone happens to find themselves in Southern Virginia.
Recommend Corning Museum of Glass (upstate NY) for similar reasons. Really awesome.