Short answers, pulled from the story.
Chance Brothers manufactured crown window glass, cylinder blown sheet glass, plate glass, optical glass, lighthouse optics, cathode-ray tubes, and precision bore tubing. The company also produced stained glass windows, microscope slides, glass tubing, and specialist industrial glass across nearly two centuries of operation at Smethwick.
Robert Lucas Chance bought the British Crown Glass Company's works in Spon Lane in November 1822. His brother William Chance rescued the struggling business with an investment in 1832, and the two became formal partners in 1836, renaming it Chance Brothers and Company after dissolving a partnership with the Hartley Brothers.
Chance Brothers glazed the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851. The company had developed the ability to produce very long panes of window glass around 1848, following an earlier order for a large greenhouse on the Chatsworth estate, and that capability secured the Crystal Palace contract.
From 1851, Chance Brothers produced optical components, machinery, and equipment for lighthouses worldwide. James Timmins Chance pioneered placing lamps inside Fresnel lens cages called optics to increase light output, and John Hopkinson, while employed at Chance Brothers, invented the rotating optics system that let sailors distinguish adjacent lighthouses by their flash patterns.
Chance Brothers produced up to 7,000 cathode-ray tubes per week for radar detection displays during World War II, using Hysil borosilicate glass. In 1943, the War Artists' Advisory Committee commissioned the artist Mervyn Peake to document the production work at the Smethwick site.
Pilkington Brothers took a 50 percent shareholding in 1945 and assumed full financial control by the end of 1952. Flat glass production at Smethwick ceased in 1976 and the site closed in 1981. A management buy-out in 1992 returned the Malvern, Worcestershire factory to private ownership as Chance Glass Limited, which continues to operate today.