DURALEX GLASS

A Legend Lives On

From Le Devoir, 29th-30th October 2005. Please note that the following article is a computerised translation (by Google) of this web page from French to English.

Duralex - vexations of glass worship

Vintage Duralex sticker Object marking of the decades 1960-1970, Duralex glass remains a legend. Invented by Saint-Gobain then passed of hand in hand, it belongs today to a Turk who hopes to save the mark [marque] while misant on his very French identity.

Vault-Saint-Mesmin - let us raise a misunderstanding. The figure at the bottom, the bottom of Duralex glass. "You have which age?" "I have 17, and you?" The small play impassioned generations of children per hour of the meal, between grated carrots and ox-mashed potaties. One could age ten years of the day at the following day, and renovate as much.

One suspected it a little: this figure fetish is not an age. A simple number, that of the mould in which had been manufactured glass. Here what to crack the myth. Because the goblet Duralex, it is a base common to million people, a tower Eiffel of the table, an object present in a corner of all the memories.

Its recognized virtue is its astonishing solidity. What hardly characterizes glass in general. "There is a mythology of the object from its simple form and its resistance", advances Jean-Luc Olivié, conservative of the center of glass to the Museum of decorative arts, in Paris. "It was considered unbreakable." "Duralex" contains at the same time a malicious allusion to a Latin quotation: Lex sed lex lasted (the law is hard, but it is the law).

Hearths were equipped in Duralex crockery because it was not notched in the dishwasher. The treasurers of the schools placed order of thousands of units by knowing that breakage would be limited. Publicity even encouraged to test it. "Four incredible tests: use it like a hammer, drop it, type above, make pass it from the sherbet ebullient."

All the same, it is not indestructible. In the middle of a noodle brawl, that which is found brutally by ground always does not have the chance to escape from it. In funny of noise checkmate, it explodes in a cloud of small pieces. Virtue, posthumous that one, which fed another argument marketing: one has less of risks to cut oneself.

Collective memory

Equipped with as many qualities intrinsic and pushed by an ad hoc publicity, Duralex makes devastations in the Sixties. A spot with its glory gains even the price of the 12th international Festival of advertising film of Cannes in 1965.

One then finds it in all great surfaces. In 1964, 133 million articles - goblets, plates, dishes - leave the moulds. And the borders gain. In the Seventies, it is sold some in nearly 120 countries. Duralex openly estampillé "Made in France", paragon of the ordinary object, will be last knack. Thus, one evokes the whim of an American rich person who will dissolve himself Duralex glass in solid gold. The difficulties which the mark crosses today - liquidation in June, plan of continuation outstanding - do not manage to make forget this golden age.

Because the name was encrusted in the collective memory. The mark joined the galaxy of the utensils of great consumption of this time, not far from the Refrigerator or of the Mobylette... "Duralex glass was listed in a number of the Notebooks of the design published by the APCI [Agency for the promotion of industrial creation] in 1986, note Jean-Luc Olivié. It is there each time one evokes other industrial products like the razor or the Bic pen."

Panes of car to glass of table

If the figure at the bottom were an age, fifty-nine would have to be read. It is known that Duralex was born with Vault-Saint-Mesmin (Loiret), very close to Orleans, in 1946. Before thinking of investing the unbreakable crockery, Saint-Gobain was concerned with road safety. Before the Second World war, for the panes of the cars, its researchers reflect at the point a tempered glass. Here is the kind of experiment carried out in the laboratory of the company: one dropped a steel ball one kilo a height of 1,50 meter on a tempered glass ice. The latter resisted the shock while an ordinary ice subjected to the same treatment flew in glares. For glass of table, much of breaking had to be necessary before opposing its brittleness.

Undoubtedly smelling a promising market, Saint-Gobain launches out in the crockery. The Duralex mark is deposited on June 6, 1945 for "objects out of glass for culinary use, in particular out of tempered glass". Its cradle will be the factory of Vault-Saint-Mesmin, "repurchased with the Coty perfumer in 1936 and reconverted bottle manufacture with glass in a hurry of households (glasses to drinking, cups, plates, etc)", written Jean-Pierre Daviet, academic who worked on the history of Saint-Gobain. The launching of the first goblet, undoubtedly the Multi-stage one (the corpulent one with a line crushes in the medium), is gone back to 1946. It inaugurates a long series.

During the history of Duralex, more than one hundred of different articles were also imagined, of the round dish to the hollow dish while passing by the plate and the salad bowl.

Forty-eight moulds

In six decades, manufacture did not vary much. Glass itself, solidified liquid, obeys a receipt antédiluvienne containing sand, of lime and alumina. "All is question of balance between the various ingredients", explains Maurice Boucheron, the person in charge for the factory of the Vault, by indicating the patent weighing machines and the mixers. "One puts a pinch of Ci, a pinch of that... then one mixes." Another development: there are 48 moulds Gigogne goblet. To be 75 years old in marc Duralex is thus impossible.

But the great time of conquest of the market lived. The factory does not count any more that 226 paid and appears almost empty. The Duralex glassmaking had started its decline in 1975. In June 2005, Duralex International France files for bankruptcy. Is this the end of a mark? Resisting until the end, it still gives itself a chance. On October 5, a plan of continuation was presented at the commercial court of Orleans by Sinan Solmaz, a Turkish wholesaler 38 years and first customer of the mark, which believes in the identity potential. "Duralex is a great name in Turkey, in India, in Spain, everywhere in the world", defends sole owner of the company in English with the means-Eastern accent. There is even a photograph of Bin Laden with Duralex glass with the hand.