Libbey-Owens-Ford Glass Co. of Toledo is a triple-threat firm on the technological front. Inventing, buying and licensing, it has diversified its flat-glass line into 14 types of product from curved ("invisible") show windows to "glastone" building bricks. But three-fifths of L-O-F's business is selling safety glass to the automobile industry, principally General Motors.
More fertile than L-O-F's own fertile laboratories are those of the spectacular plastics industry. Nine years ago Mellon Institute presented Toledo Scales Co. with a urea-formaldehyde resin which combined the best features of two earlier plastics, cellulose acetate (translucent, colorable) and phenolic resin (heat-resistant, hard). Toledo Scales formed...
