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Aye, and this drives me nuts. For 50+ years, "Pyrex" was the name of a material, borosilicate glass, with known material properties. You could count on it being
by myself248 3y ago
Aye, and this drives me nuts. For 50+ years, "Pyrex" was the name of a material, borosilicate glass, with known material properties. You could count on it being safe in certain situations.
Then Corning somehow decided that it was the name of a _brand_, and they could use whatever inferior material they wanted, and if you put it in those same situations it would explode and cover your kitchen/lab in glass shards.
How that was even legal, I will never understand.
- retrac 3y agoPyrex, the term, was originally a brand for borosilicate glass. It has become partially generic over the years, like Aspirin or Kleenex. Aspirin is still a trademark of Bayer in Canada; if they want to switch to ibuprofen instead of aspirin as the active ingredient, and sell it as Aspirin, they could. Similarly, if Kimberley-Clark decides to start selling sandpaper and call them Kleenex, they could. If a trademark becomes fully generic it can be ruled so by a court, at which point the trademark protection is lost. Aspirin is like that in the US. But that is pretty rare these days.
- MagnumOpus 3y agoAspirin is different - the US trademark for the name was explicitly expropriated from Bayer by the US government during WW1 and became a generic... that didn't happen to Kleenex or Pyrex.
- myself248 3y agoBut if someone sold ibuprofen as "aspirin", doctors would rightfully decry the move as likely to get someone killed. It's a generic but it has a specific meaning. Selling soda-lime glass as "pyrex" has gotten plenty of people injured, but evidently none severely enough to sue Corning's pants off.