Patent ID: 7305853

Claim:
A method of manufacturing a glass panel comprising the steps of: providing a pair of glass plates opposed to each other, each glass plate having plate surfaces; arranging a number of space-maintaining members along said plate surfaces with predetermined intervals between rows, thereby defining a void between said pair of glass plates; and joining said pair of glass plates throughout a circumference thereof with a thermally meltable seal member; hermetically sealing said thermally meltable seal member by a heat-joining process; and decompressing the void between said pair of glass plates by a decompressing process during a cooling process after the heat-joining process, wherein said decompressing process being effected before said thermally meltable seal member is hardened; and wherein the distance between outermost rows of said space-maintaining members and peripheral edges of said pair of glass plates is at most 5.8 times a thickness of a thinner glass plate of said pair of glass plates.