in reading this bit on evan's shatttered glass, it occured to me that i had always thought it came down to wether the glass had been tempered or not. my roommate and i in college bought a case of standard bar pint glasses (from a restaurant supply shop) that were labelled as heat-tempered. i have never seen one of these break from hot water, despite his regular use of them for tea. that all having been said, this site implies that tempering is purely an issue of increased strength and dafety breakage, not greater heat tolerance. hm.

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Evan [ 02/16/2004 21:01]: That site (alumaxbath) brings up the terms temper and anneal. I think annealing would reduce the cracking issue. Maybe the term annealed glass doesn't sound right to the box label maker and so she writes "Tempered". I have used many vessels for hot tea including the cheapest Vlassic pickle jars (Vlassic RIP-- killed by Wal-Mart as directly as if assassinated, BTW). And my only cracked glasses came in 1984 and 2003. And the latter case was that ornamentally crazed schooner full of spidercracks already. It was Rae's. It was careless of me to put tea in that thing.