Windscreen Strength & The Seattle Pitting Mystery
Windscreens are designed to be very tough, not often breaking in normal operation and maintaining their shape when they do.
However, there is always the potential for kicked-up stones, vandalism, heavy snow or hail, or some unfortunate act of fate that can lead to a chip or crack. This is why windscreen insurance is essential to avoid being saddled with the cost of a new one if your insurance does not cover it otherwise.
One consequence of the strength of windscreens is that chips can develop into cracks large enough to legally require fixing so slowly that it is hard to work out what the cause is.
On an individual scale, it is frustrating and confusing, but over in the US back in the 50s, it.gave rise to a state-wide windscreen mystery.
The Seattle Pitting Mystery
By March 1954, all cars had safety glass windscreens, which meant that both the safety and cost to buy replacements increased dramatically compared to the first half of the 20th century.
However, in Washington State, in the Pacific Northwest, a concerning trend of pitting damage happened to many windscreens in the town of Bellingham, close to the state capital of Seattle.
These small holes, dings, pits and tiny cracks were initially believed to be the work of vandals during a time when it was common for youths to play with BB guns, slingshots and air cannons, but by April, the spread of pitting damage started to reach epidemic levels.
Not only were hundreds of cars affected in Bellingham, but nearby cities such as Anacortes (where the police lost count of the number of windscreens affected), Mount Vernon and Sedro Woolley were gripped by a pitting epidemic that became a widespread news story.
Too many cars were affected so quickly for it to be vandals, so there were a lot of theories for why the windscreens were damaged, from radio waves from a nearby transmitter, cosmic rays, falling ash, sand fleas and even a secret nuclear test.
So many people looked for a common cause for their windscreen woes, but the real cause was far more revealing.
There was no secret windscreen-wrecking nuclear test, no hot ash, no sand fleas, no strange widespread contaminated batch of windscreens that started to bubble on their own, but instead, a wide group of people finally paid attention to the state of their windscreens at once.
It was a mass delusion created because of an early group of stories of vandals damaging windscreens that caused people in the Seattle area to check their own, see they were damaged and assume it had the same mysterious cause.
The Seattle Pitting Epidemic has since become a fascinating episode in the history of psychology and has since been cited in a wide variety of other cases of collective delusion and mass hysteria.
What is even more telling is that it only happened because people took their windscreens for granted and did not think they could be affected by wear and tear the same way the tyres, body panels and engine components could be.