The Glass Famine - by Ed Conway - Material World
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The Glass Famine<br>Spies, war, industrial subterfuge and secret recipes. And it all really happened. Honestly, what more could you ask for?<br>Jul 12, 2023
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Photo by Ran Berkovich on Unsplash<br>When I began writing Material World I tried my hardest not to spend too much time thinking about the newsworthiness or otherwise of the content. This is not, shall we say, especially easy for a journalist. But the whole point of the book is that it needs to stand the test of time; to be readable in a decade as well as today. Let me know whether you think it passed that test.<br>But the upshot of all that is that I do wonder whether some of the lessons from the stories are a little subtle.<br>With that in mind, here is the story of the “glass famine”, one of the earliest tales in Chapter 1, in a slightly more “unsubtle” format. Hopefully for those of you who haven’t read the book it’ll give you a sense of some of the stuff I cover in there and for those of you who have it’ll drum in the relevance for modern policy.<br>Before I begin, it’s worth emphasising that the below is only a very brief rendition of an issue and set of events covered in much more depth in the book, which is available in most territories (save for North America) at the time of writing. Please buy it!<br>Order Material World
Photo by National Library of Scotland on Unsplash<br>August, 1915
War is raging on the Western Front. Thousands are dying every day. It’s already shaping up to be the bloodiest war in history. Guns, bombs, even chemical weapons like chlorine and mustard gas.<br>Amid the fighting, a spy is despatched from the Ministry of Munitions in London to Switzerland, there on a very special mission. He is there to procure one of the world’s most advanced pieces of military technology.<br>That technology is… glass. Or, to be more precise, optical glass: binoculars, telescopes, sniperscopes.<br>Now while these things may sound somewhat trivial today, in 1914 advanced lenses were a massive deal. This was the first great war fought at long distances. Advances in ballistics & weaponry meant ranges went up to 40,000 to 60,000 yards. And those with the best lenses had the best chance of hitting their targets. They had an enormous advantage.<br>And as WWI began, there was no doubting who had the upper hand: Germany.<br>Germany totally dominated world production of precision optics via its company Zeiss (making lenses) and Schott (making the glass going into those lenses).<br>Britain, on the other hand, was reliant on Germany for around two thirds of its optics. So when the war began and those supplies were suddenly shut off, the UK was left facing a “glass famine”.<br>In the opening months of the war, British troops were killed in terrifying numbers by German snipers (with Zeiss scopes). British soldiers, meanwhile, were being sent out to the trenches without any binoculars. It fast became an emergency.<br>There was a public appeal and newspaper campaigns encouraging people to donate their binoculars, opera glasses, anything, to troops heading to the front. Even the King & Queen donated some of theirs. But it wasn’t enough.<br>Which brings us back to the spy sent to Switzerland. His mission was to find a way of buying binoculars off the Germans; to buy a technology off the enemy to use to kill the enemy.<br>This, by the way, is not supposition. It comes from the official govt account. Here’s one bit I quote in the book:<br>Preliminary investigations had led to the conclusion that the only country which could supply optical instruments in bulk was Germany, and in order to obviate a breakdown in the supply of these essential instruments a representative of the Ministry of Munitions was sent out to Switzerland in August, 1915, to ascertain whether it was possible to obtain instruments from German sources.
The only thing crazier than this proposal… was that the Germans actually said yes . They were not just willing but seemed to bend over backwards to provide binoculars (to be used to help kill their troops). Here’s the passage from the history of the Ministry of Munitions:
Why were they willing to provide this advanced military technology to their deadly enemy? Because in much the same way as the UK was desperately short of glass lenses, Germany was desperately short of rubber for their tyres and engine fan belts. And the UK controlled much of the global supply of rubber via her colonies.<br>So, for a period the two great powers were so desperate for raw materials they were willing to suspend the normal conventions of warfare. Rubber for glass.<br>How did we get here?
Before we go further (because what happened next is poss even more interesting and has some practical lessons for today), it's worth delving into why Britain found itself so short of glass in 1914.<br>Because as it happens, a century or so earlier it had a world-leading optical industry. And glass - humdrum as it might seem - was the great advanced technology of...