Apparently, folks in the late 1940s were concerned about one-way vision glass being installed the wrong way in their bathroom windows.
“Wrong-Way Window,” Fallon County Times [Baker, Montana], 2 May 1946.
“Town Councillor Gives Bare Facts on New-Fangled Glass,” The Independent-Record [Helena, Montana], 19 September 1948, p. 1.
The New Yorker, 7 Aug 1948, p. 17.
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Oversight
A peculiar thing happened in the construction of a group of new apartment houses in a Boston residential district. The builders went in for a number of the latest improvements, including, among other things, one-way-vision glass in the large, low bathroom windows, through which tenants could gaze while luxuriating in large, low tubs, safe from outside eyes. That's what they're doing now, presumably, but the idea went awry at the start. Someone forgot to tell the workmen who installed the glass that there was anything special about it, and, consequently, chance decided which end of a pane went in and which side out. The tenants who couldn't see through their windows concluded that for some up-to-the-moment reason they were up against ordinary opaque glass, or maybe a television screen, and, meek before science, said nothing to the management. It was the neighbors who got the mixup straightened out, we're told, with the aid of the police, the Health Department, and the Watch and Ward Society.
