A forgotten product: The glass that was almost indestructable
The story of ‘Superfest’, an extremely durable, east-german drinking glass that was too durable
At the beginning of the 1970s, restaurant owners across the country complained about a shortage of drinking glasses and rumors, that the people had to drink their beer out of paper cups, had reached the government officials of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). After taking into consideration of the limited and dwindling resources of the country on the edge of the soviet union, it was decided that a more robust type of glass shall be developed that can withstand the daily use in restaurants or bars for longer periods of time.
Development started in 1975 and in 1977 the efforts in research & development culminated in the GDR patent number 157966, a glass manufacturing process that resulted in a product called “Ceverit”, which in hopes of creating a high selling export product, was also registered internationally (for example US patent nr 4397668).
“Ceverit” glass boasted a lifetime of at least 5 times that of regular glass at the time — it even survived multiple drops onto stone surfaces. In fact, the operations manager of the manufacturing plant used to demo this to visitors and potential buyers by just throwing a glass at the next wall — resulting in astonished faces as nothing happened. Because of these properties, it was dubbed “Superfest”, “super solid” in German.
Manufacturing
To supply East Germany with CEVERIT glasses, the manufacturing task was awarded to the “VEB Sachsenglas Schwepnitz”, a glass manufacturing plant in the 2600 people village Schwepnitz.
A new building was erected and for this prestige project of the GDR an automatic and at the time state-of-the-art glass production machine from Japan was imported (no small feat at the time; remember this is a communist country at the edge of the soviet union with neither much capital nor relations to capitalist countries) to produce the base glass.
