Is it useful to stuff my glasses with newspaper to protect them?
(I'm not sure if this question belongs to this stack exchange, but it seems appropriate to me)
I have a very practical situation and our knowledge is lacking to be able to solve our debate.
The situation
In our country, and I'm guessing everywhere in the world, people seem to always fill their drinking glasses with about one or even half a page of newspaper. I'm talking about regular 20 or 30 cl drinking glasses or mugs.
When asked why they do this, it is to "protect the glass". 537
The most scienty of them told me "the pressure given by the paper inside the glass helps hold its integrity in case the glass undergoing opposite pressure from the outside (which it most likely is considering it's packed in the same box with many other glasses).
My argument is that the glass being a solid and pretty much not flexible at all, you'd have to put a huge amount of paper in each glass to actually make a difference.
Ideally, not adding too much pressure from the inside to not break it that way, but filling it so that there is as little air as possible seems to me that this is the safest option. But that is by far the worst in terms of using paper and time consumption.
What I told them to do is focus on the outside of the glass when packing. Adding a few layers of very scrunched paper to act as some kind of "spring" all outside the glass, therefore spreading the pressure coming from the outside into the paper, instead of helping the glass sustain said pressure by adding pressure from the inside.
The questions :
* What solution works best to protect the glass ?
* What solution is actually viable, not costing 20 minutes per glass and thousands of pages of newspapers.
* Is there anything else to this?
Note that I am not a native english speaker and there might be false friends between our languages.
By "pressure" I mean the act of applying a force onto a surface.
"Scrunched" was google translated, it should mean "the extreme opposite of flat, like when you make a ball with paper and then expand it again"
Thanks for reading and for your time :) 1018