East Germany during the cold war invented a "chemically hardened" glass. After the USSR collapsed and East Germany reunified with West Germany, the company, "Superfest Gläser", was closed. It turned out in the "capitalist" economy of the West, nobody wanted beer glasses that never break -- you make more money by selling glasses that do break.
There's a lesson there revenant to the future: understanding when the market lacks incentives for producing durable products, or actively favors its reverse, "planned obsolescence".
Apparently the East German Superfest Gläser chemically hardened glass was chemically different from Pyrex, the closest similar product we have in our economy. According to the article, the East German Superfest Gläser glass used a special potassium chloride solution that fused with the glass surface, filling in in micro ruptures within the glass structure, making the glass less prone to breaking. Pyrex, in contrast, is "borosilicate" glass, so called because it's made by combining regular glass with boric oxide. Pyrex's claim to fame isn't actually its hardness, it's its "low-thermal-expansion", making it ideal for measuring things with measurement lines that don't move around when the container is heated.
The East German glass was called "Ceverit".
"'Ce' stood for Chemisch (Chemically), 'ver' for verfestigt (hardened) and the 'it' stood for the silica component."
