Glass bead

“ Glass beads are utterly unnecessary, and there is no design or thought employed in their manufacture. They are formed by first drawing out the glass into rods; these rods are chopped up into fragments of the size of beads by the human hand, and the fragments are then rounded in the furnace. The men who chop up the rods sit at their work all day, their hands vibrating with a perpetual and exquisitely timed palsy, and the beads dropping beneath their vibration like hail. ”

“ The next bead is a small round greeny lump of copper ore; the next is a lump of rough turquoise; the next is a rough gold nugget (what they call water-gold) ; the next is a melon-shaped clay bead (white with green spots) . Then come four flat ivory pieces, with dots on them rather like dominoes; then come three stone beads, very badly worn; then two soft iron beads with rust-holes at the edges (they must have been magic, because they look very common) ; and last is a very very old African bead, like glass blue, red, white, black, and yellow. ”

“ White beads, are made in the largest quantities, and to watch the operations of the workmen is most interesting and instructive. The men sit at tables furnished with a blowing apparatus to which are fitted pipes for blowing the flame of the lamp upon the glass. By means of the pointed flame; which can be easily regulated by the operator, the glass-blower on getting his material heated to the required degree, draws the tube until he gets it to the thickness wanted for the particular bead in hand ”

“ Beads have been made from remote antiquity, and are found in early Egyptian tombs; variegated glass beads, found in the ground in certain parts of Africa, as Ashantiland, and highly prized by the natives as aggry-beads, are supposed to be of Egyptian or Phoenician origin. Beads of the more expensive materials are strung in necklaces and worn as articles of personal adornment, while the cheaper kinds are employed for the decoration of women’s dress. ”

“ Glass beads have long been used for purposes of barter with savage tribes, and are made in enormous numbers and varieties, especially in Venice, where the manufacture has existed from at least the 14th century. ”

“ XVIII. OLD PASTE, GLASS BEADS, AND TAWS PASTE All artificial “stones” used in jewellery are glass—glass variously shaped, cut, and coloured—but “old paste” is glass not coloured; though it may be backed with coloured foil, which shows a tint through the glass. Old-paste collecting is, therefore, a branch of old-glass collecting, and cannot be ignored in this book. ”

“ Judging from these glass beads, others found associated with them or with things of white manufacture in the same grave are also modern; while some seem to be old and from sites believed to be ancient. Besides objects truly of the shape of beads, there are others, as for instance the tubes of copper such as are shown in Figs. ”

“ Of these last, the dominant type—and we must confine ourselves to this—is of a turquoise or deep blue, generally more or less transparent, and they are often longitudinally ribbed. In a collection of Germanic beads, on the other hand, the prevailing colours are red and yellow, of ochry tints; they are almost invariably quite opaque, and the patterns are mostly built up on the surface in a way that reminds us of the primitive glass of the Eastern Mediterranean (Plate XV. 3) . ”

“ What it is that he aims at expressing by means of this often sombre glass cannot indeed be better presented than in his own words:—‘Mist and dews half shroud and half reveal the fine veinings and splashings in a grey jade-crystal vase. A thick flushing of rose-tinted glass is carved into a chimera-like flower, half influorescent, half smiling, half weary, half orchid, half pansy. A beetle drags its slow length over the rust of the lichens. Side by side with flesh-tints and carnations we see bold touches of coral pink. A pale gleam steals through the dull maze of iridium. ”

“ I treat of them here, as in by far the larger number of instances, if not in all cases, these beads can be undoubtedly recognised as of Venetian manufacture. These chevron beads have been made from canes built up of concentric layers of coloured glass. They have attracted exceptional attention from the fact that examples have been found in so many widely separated parts of the world, and from their possessing, in some cases, apparently well founded claims to great age. The arrangement and the succession of the colours in the glass is in every case practically identical. ”

“ Liquid Beads.
Instead of melting gold, water rolled on to a table thickly dusted with lycopodium, or other fine dust, or quicksilver rolled or thrown upon a smooth table, will show the difference in the shape of large and small beads perfectly. A magnifying-glass will make the difference more evident. In using quicksilver, be careful that none of it falls on gold or silver coins, or jewellery, or plate, or on the ornamental gilding on book-covers. It will do serious damage. ”

“ The only fault, from our point of view, to be found with our English word is that it may be applied to objects made of other materials than glass. A term of very similar origin—‘paternosters’—was formerly employed for a certain class of large beads in France and Italy, but the use of it has never become general.
We have seen that towards the end of the thirteenth century the cristallai di cristallo di rocca fell foul of the glass-workers of Murano, and induced the authorities to forbid the imitation of their work in the inferior material. ”

“ This was the process adopted for the smaller beads—the conterie—which, before packing, were threaded on a string by girls. The larger perle, such as the perle a rosette, or chevron beads, of which I shall speak presently, had to be ground into shape on the wheel. Any ornament or design that appears on these beads depended of course upon the constitution of the original canna. This was often built up of a succession of layers of various colours, obtained by dipping the first gathering into one or more pots of coloured glass, before drawing it out to form a tube. ”

“ Surely so much information has rarely been compressed into one print as we find in the main illustration to this part of Agricola’s text (Plate XXXVIII.) . Here at one working-hole (fenestrella) we see a workman gathering the glass at the end of his fistula or blowing-iron, another is shaping the gathering upon the marver at his foot, a third is vigorously blowing the paraison to the required size, and a fourth is swinging another round his head. On the ground lie scattered moulds of various forms, and here, too, we may discover the forceps (pucella) used in shaping the glass. ”

“ Layard speaks of this vase as being shaped and hollowed on a turner’s lathe after being ‘blown in one solid piece’ (Nineveh and Babylon, 1853) —a curious expression for one who interested himself so much in the manufacture of glass! We may, perhaps, regard it as having been carved like an object of rock crystal out of a solid piece of glass. We know of nothing like it from Egypt, but then the Egyptians had no love for transparent, colourless materials; from an early time, as we have seen, they had covered their beads of rock crystal with a blue glaze (cf. p. 20) . ”

“ Among the most profuse of Anglo-Saxon remains are the beads and necklaces of glass, of amber, and of other materials, many of which are of extreme beauty. The greater part of the beads which are found are composed of glass, transparent and opaque; variegated clays of different colours; and of amber. Less frequently beads of amethystine quartz, of crystal, and of other rare natural substances are found. Sometimes the beads are formed singly, and at other times they are in couplets or triplets. Beads of metal—gold and silver—and of stones set in the same precious metals, have also been exhumed. ”

“ In France, Germany and the United States it is rare to find a piece of table-ware which has not received its shape in a mould. The old and the new systems of making a wine-glass illustrate almost all the ordinary processes of glass working. Sufficient glass is first “gathered” on the end of a blowing iron to form the bowl of the wine-glass. The mere act of coiling an exact weight of molten glass round the end of a rod 4 ft. in length requires considerable skill. The mass of glass is rolled on a polished slab of iron, the “marvor,” to solidify it, and it is then slightly hollowed by blowing. ”

“ For smaller objects—jewellery, beads, and inlay of various descriptions—they had command of a wide scale of colours—reds and tawny yellows from jasper, purple from the amethyst, greens from root of emerald and from a special kind of felspar, and blue 22 from the turquoise and (at a very early period) from the lapis lazuli. But the stones to which they had recourse for their favourite blues and greens were rare, and they were therefore the more ready to find a cheaper substitute in glass. ”

“ Points to be considered are the colour of the metal, the perfection of the twist, its opacity, and the character of the foot. The colour and weight of the glass are probably the best criteria. The forgeries are generally light, and the beautiful mellow tone of the real old English glass is replaced by a cold white tint or even a tinge of green. The twist is often more translucent than in the genuine pieces, and is frequently imperfectly produced, becoming looser as it descends, the loosening being particularly pronounced just before its junction with the foot. ”

“ The twelve petals are of blue, green, and red (the latter colour quite superficial) on a white ground. Still more remarkable is a vase with galloping horses and negroes; in this case the design is apparently inlaid on the interior, and only seen through the transparent body.
The little pots for cosmetics, in the shape of truncated cones, are usually made of a turquoise-glazed fayence. Those of glass are very rare; one in the British Museum is decorated on a nearly black base with splashes of white enamel ”

“ Cut glass is a fine setting for flowers of strong colour, but kills the paler hues, and above and beyond all is the dark moss-green glass of substantial texture that is fashioned in an endless variety of shapes. By chance, gift, and purchase we have gathered about a dozen pieces of this, ranging from a cylinder almost the size of an umbrella-stand down through fluted, hat-shaped dishes, for roses or sweet peas, to some little troughs of conventional shapes in which pansies or other short-stemmed flowers may be arranged so as to give the look of an old-fashioned parterre to the dining table. ”

“ What one would like to have would be a pigment whose own fusing-point was the same, or about the same, as that of the glass itself, so that the surface, at least, of the piece of glass softens to receive it and lets it right down into itself. You should never be satisfied with the firing of your glass unless it presents two qualifications: first, that the surface of the glass has melted and begun to run together; and second, that the fused pigment is quite glossy and shiny, not the least dull or rusty looking, when the glass is cool. ”

“ Instead of the beautiful clarity and perfect transparency we are accustomed to associate with glass, there is often a streakiness or cloudiness visible in the material, together with numerous bubbles and flaws. If the striations are horizontal, the glass is of an earlier type than if they are perpendicular. The sides of the bowl are often irregular, and the stems are often clumsy, uneven, badly balanced, and altogether disproportionate in point of size to an eye accustomed to the slenderer style of modern glassware. An important point is the junction between the bowl{24} and the stem. ”

“ I should have told you, however, that in our finest and most brilliant glass, a quantity of the oxide of lead is put, which vitrifies with the other ingredients, and gives the glass more firmness and density. The blue, yellow, and red glasses are coloured with the oxides of other metals. As to the common green glass, it is made with an alkali that has a good deal of calcareous earth remaining with the ashes of the plant. But to understand all the different circumstances of glassmaking, one must have a thorough knowledge of chymistry. ”

“ In the seventeenth century the whole process was revolutionised by the introduction of a large proportion of oxide of lead, making what is technically known as “flint” glass—a glass much more brilliant than any other, a quality due partly to its transparency and partly to its increased refractive power, which renders it specially fitted for “cutting”—a process which enhances its beauty by increasing the number of ways in which the light rays falling on the glass are dispersed. ”

“ In this, narrow strips of metal are soldered edgeways to the groundwork and the spaces between are filled with differently coloured enamel, the different colours being thus separated by strips of metal.
When the enameller's attention was first turned to glasswork, in which different coloured pieces of glass were separated by strips of lead, he must have been struck with the similarity of the two arts, and have perceived that the style of design already developed in enamel could be applied with little change to glasswork. ”

“ Common paste, [6] which is met with in drapery goods and cheap ornaments in general—hat-pins, buckles, and so forth—is composed of ordinary crown-glass or flint-glass, the refractive indices being about 1·53 and 1·63 respectively. The finest quality, which is used for imitations of brilliants, is called ‘strass.’ It is a dense lead flint-glass of high refraction and strong colour-dispersion, consisting of 38·2 per cent. of silica, 53·3 red lead (oxide of lead) , and 7·8 potassium carbonate, with small quantities of soda, alumina, and other substances. ”