`Sango Bath (Saint-Gobain) founding and long-term strategy`

Abraham Thévart, 1688, pours glass on metal table, rollers, anneal, grind, polish. Saint-Gobain provides windows and mirrors to Versailles. French trade secret in stirring molten glass (Guinand 1798, perfected 1805) holds for ~100 years before British acquire it. MIT departmental tie: alum Kapoor ran Saint-Gobain Northborough research center; funds MadMec.

Plate glass manufacturing, on the other hand — which is what you were asking about — was invented about 1688 by Abraham Thévart, and that became the Saint-Gobain company. Anybody ever heard of Saint-Gobain? Saint-Gobain's got a lot of contacts with this department, in part because one of my former doctoral students, Kapoor, was head of their research center in Northborough, and he started the MadMec and all this other stuff — they fund those things. But Saint-Gobain, in 1688, Abraham Thévart learned to pour glass onto a metal table, spreading it with rollers, annealing, grinding and polishing. That was the beginning of Saint-Gobain.