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" At a quarter of a mile long, and a height of nearly 1,000 feet above ground, China&amp;#039;s\u00A0Zhangjiajie bridge would be nerve-wracking if its bottom wasn&amp;#039;t made out of glass. So how do you assuage the fears of any would-be tourists you are afraid might chicken out? Get a guy up there with a sledgehammer and just let him go to town. No seriously.\u00A0 A BBC reporter was recently invited to the bridge to do exactly that, and because he is either insane or is very very devoted to participating in eye-catching stunt\u00A0journalism (and act we should all genuinely applaud) he followed through on the offer and stood on the bridge while assaulting what appears to be an\u00A0additional\u00A0glass plate with a sledgehammer, hitting it no less than a dozen times. The glass cracks, sure,\u00A0but it\u00A0stays structurally sound.\u00A0      While the damage looks scary, this is a great example of the glass doing exactly what it&amp;#039;s designed to do. Two years ago, when the Skydeck floor of Chicago&amp;#039;s Willis Tower (1,500 feet above ground) shattered, it had a similarly scary look, but stayed structurally sound because this kind of glass is designed not to lose much of its strength from cracking.\u00A0 As Gizmodo explained, regarding the Willis Tower:\u00A0  Skydeck&amp;#039;s box is made out of super-strong plates of glass, each weighing 1,500 pounds. The floor of the deck is made from three of these half-inch thick panels sandwiched together with a laminate.Laminated glass doesn&amp;#039;t shatter when it breaks. That&amp;#039;s thanks to a layer\u2014or layers\u2014of super-strong polyvinyl butyral or a similar material. This clear plastics sticks to the glass so that if it cracks, the pieces stay intact. That&amp;#039;s why the glass in your windshield doesn&amp;#039;t shatter under the force of an accident.  The glass of the\u00A0Zhangjiajie bridge probably isn&amp;#039;t identical, but you can bet its similar. So yes, the\u00A0Zhangjiajie is probably just as safe as any non-transparent bridge. Then again, fear doesn&amp;#039;t have to be rational to be real.\u00A0 Source: BBC via Gizmodo "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a21323/zhangjiajie-bridge-sledgehammer-test/>