After a brief stop at the bank, he leads us to the edge of a vast, weed-choked parcel that for 100 years was home to a plate glass factory, Crystal City's economic raison d'etre.
Layers of material which work as filters, electrodes, transistors and the liquid crystal itself are deposited onto a thin glass plate to form a sandwich that is covered with another pane of glass.
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The top mirror, made up of a stack of thin, partially reflective films, is attached to a plate of glass that forms the front of the display.
The result was to convert the surface of a glass plate into the shape of a spiral staircase with 16 steps.
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It is rather like one of the buffet dinners so favoured by global gatherings, where you have to balance a wine glass and a plate in one hand, feed yourself with the other, try and have a sensible conversation and exchange cards with three people at the same time.
You had merely to lead them to the plate-glass porch door and point out a squirrel or a cat running on the railing, or the automatic pool vacuum flipping its tail in the water as it carried on, side to side, end to end.
The nanotubes are mixed into a compound called "bucky gel" to prevent clumping, and after some rubber-like flourinated copolymer is mixed in and it's all poured onto a glass plate, holes are punched in the material to better flexibility.
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Overall it has undecorated flat surfaces with a plate of glass on the front all the way out to a very thin rim and a blank back.
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After all, the tablet computer is covered with a glass plate and is large and heavy enough (1.5 lbs) to easily slip out of a one-handed grasp.
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We are driven around a site with an interesting collection of buildings, from standard plate-glass towers, to lakeside villas where customers are entertained, and on to what appears to be a replica of the White House.
Dozens of skyscrapers crowd the model from end to end, plate glass is everywhere suggesting that city planners see the Khartoum of the future shimmering like a giant chandelier over the desert.
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