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Advancing through the professional hockey playoffs is truly a Herculean effort, as is keeping the puck and players on the ice. With the speed and physicality that will mark this year’s championship games, it’s hard to imagine that dasher boards were once topped with a chicken wire mesh barrier to keep play on the ice.

While the mesh offered a mostly unobstructed view of the action on the ice, the openings between the wire also gave fans an opportunity to poke opposing players, or an official, with a hat pin if they lingered too close to the boards.

In 1940, a stronger barrier came into play when the Duquesne Gardens in Pittsburgh became the first hockey rink to use glass above the dasher boards—leveraging the shatter-resistance of HERCULITE® heat-tempered glass, the world’s first safety glass made locally by PPG Industries (now Vitro Architectural Glass).

Photos of the Pittsburgh Hornets, Duquesne Gardens’ home team, crashing into the glass were shown nationally, in newspapers, stating “the Herculite—four to five times stronger than heavy plate glass—can withstand the bone-crushing shock of the furious ice sport.”

Though tempered glass no longer is used in hockey arenas, windows and doors made with Herculite glass remain the global standard for meeting today’s rigorous safety glass mandates.

Heat- and chemically strengthened to be lightweight, sturdy and versatile Herculite glass is still the industry’s oldest and most trusted safety glass brand.

Vitro Glass has four technical documents (TDs) related to heat-strengthened and tempered glass, including:

• : Discusses the stiffness of glass and the deflection characteristics of annealed, heat-strengthened and tempered glass
• : Discusses visual strain patterns in tempered and heat-strengthened glass, and how and why they occur
• : Includes our recommendations concerning further fabrication of heat-strengthened and tempered glass
• : Discusses the appropriate use of heat-strengthened and tempered glass, including the occurrence of spontaneous breakage, and the use of heat-soaking of tempered glass; offers our recommendations 

To download these documents, or for more information about Herculite glass and other heat-treated glass by Vitro Glass, visit .