Short answers, pulled from the story.
Plate glass, also called flat glass or sheet glass, is used for windows, glass doors, transparent walls, and windscreens. For some architectural and automotive applications, the flat sheet is bent after production to create curved panels and shaped windscreens.
Plate glass has a higher magnesium oxide and sodium oxide content than container glass, and a lower silica, calcium oxide, and aluminium oxide content. Container glass has better chemical durability against water, which is needed for storing beverages and food.
Most flat glass is soda-lime glass produced by the float glass process, developed in the nineteen fifties. The process floats molten glass on a bath of molten tin, producing naturally smooth, parallel surfaces without grinding or polishing.
The float glass process was developed in the nineteen fifties. It became the dominant method for producing flat glass and remains the standard for most soda-lime flat glass manufactured today.
Historical methods include the broad sheet method from the thirteenth century, the window crown glass technique from the fourteenth century, the blown plate method and plate polishing from the seventeenth century, rolling in the nineteenth century, the Fourcault process in the nineteen hundreds, and the machine drawn cylinder sheet method from the early twentieth century. The float glass process arrived in the nineteen fifties, followed by the overflow downdraw method in the nineteen sixties.
In the United Kingdom, "plate glass universities" describes a generation of newer universities, borrowing from the term "red brick universities," which refers to an older generation of institutions. The label references the modernist architectural style associated with those campuses.