Finding Hyper Pure Quartz

The tank that fired first one two thirds of the time, making the need to be able to see from inside the tank critical with the field of view twice as wide as British or U.S. tanks. The lens on German tank sites often let German tank gunner see target and fire at enemy tanks before any tanks, even knew they were there. Made big enough so a range finding system could be printed onto an inner layer of the lens. Germans used just one site when attacking.

Gunners could sit in one station and look through a lens mounted next to the barrel. The gun British and U.S. tanks used two one whole periscope for looking around and spotting enemies, another for aiming the gun at them, forcing the commander to look through one to gauge distance, then yelled to the gunner to aim and fire a one lens system that helped Germany steamrolled through France at the start of the war, and just six weeks after crossing the border, found themselves the captors of Paris and the world's prized silica mine.

Fontainebleau. Just 35 miles south, it was the purest silica the world had ever seen. Less pure silica and the larger, more high powered the lens, the more distortion there is as you move away from the center of it. Rifle scope. Submarine periscopes. Tank sights. Bomb sights. Radar tubes. Fontainebleau was the single mine the entire British glass industry relied on. Gone. So, working at breakneck pace, two inferior silicon deposits in the US and the now famous Lochaline in Scotland, which would end up producing silica purer than Fontainebleau were developed to feed the Allied war machine.

Better late than never. By the midpoint of the war, the allies had managed to catch up to Germany in glass production, but it wasn't until two years after the war that the hyper pure silica that powers the entire modern world was discovered. Despite 80 years of scouring the planet, nowhere else on Earth has come close to rivaling what comes out of Spruce Pine, North Carolina. Fontainebleau is 99.7% Lochaline 99.8%. Spruce Pine is a staggering 99.999% pure silica.