Ben Marks of Collectors Weekly says,"Pyrex turns 100 this year, so Hunter Oatman-Stanford reached out to Glen Cook, chief scientist at the Corning Museum of Glass, and Regan Brumagen, one of the curators of a Pyrex exhibition at the museum that continues through March of 2016. Hunter learned that Pyrex actually began as an industrial product used in everything from telescope lenses to railroad-signal lanterns, and that it was the wife of a Corning physicist who championed its application in the kitchen."
"The story is that Dr. Jesse Littleton was discussing it over dinner with a colleague and with his wife, Bessie, who suggested that maybe this glass could be used for bakeware," says Brumagen. "One of Bessie's earthenware casserole dishes had just shattered in the oven, and she was annoyed because it was only the second time she had used it. So Dr. Littleton brought a sawed-off piece of a Nonex battery jar and Bessie made sponge cake in it. She ended up making custards in lamp chimneys and lots of other things to test them out for the company."
Bessie's experiments revealed that the borosilicate glassware heated quickly and evenly, its transparency made it easier to monitor the progress of a dish while baking, and it was easy to clean. The company soon created a new division focused on consumer products and launched its Pyrex line with 12 clear ovenware dishes in 1915. "It was a challenge to convince people to use Pyrex," says Brumagen. "All the early ads say things like, 'Yes, you can cook in it!' or 'Bake in glass!' It was just a foreign concept to consumers, so Corning had to do some persuading." In its early Pyrex marketing, the company purposefully used the jarring imagery of open flames visible through the clear glass to convey the potential of its new products.
The brand's scientific-sounding name was chosen to fit with the company's industrial lines, as several already ended in "ex." "When they developed the Pyrex formula, the first dish they made was a pie plate," says Brumagen. "I think it was Dr. Sullivan who wanted to call it 'Pierite' but was eventually overruled, and it became Pyrex since that fit with the family of products they already had—and, of course, 'pyr' is the prefix meaning 'fire.' The first ads had a little tag line underneath in quotations that said 'fire glass,' but they dropped that pretty fast."
