Glass factory

“ According to Townsend (1786) , “The glass manufacture is here carried to a degree of perfection unknown in England. The largest mirrors are made in a brass frame, one hundred and sixty-two inches long, ninety-three wide, and six deep, weighing near nine tons. These are designed wholly for the royal palaces, and for presents from the king. Yet even for such purposes the factory [254] is ill-placed, and proves a devouring monster in a country where provisions are dear, fuel scarce, and carriage exceedingly expensive.” ”

“ They want to know how things are made, and, like children, are not content until they have laid their hands on whatever confronts them. "Please do not touch" has no terrors for them. In addition to this inborn love of action, there is a fascination [Pg 26] about glass blowing and the fashioning of shapeless matter piping hot from the pot that appeals to men and women of all sorts and conditions. With eyes and mouths wide open, thousands stood daily around the circular factory watching a hundred skilled artisans at work. ”

“ A World reporter has lately visited the works in Brooklyn where the manufacture of the La Bastie toughened glass is now in active progress. The manufacturer states that, in June last, his factory was destroyed by fire, and the introduction of the glass into our markets has for that reason been delayed. ”

“ The applications of glass are so exceedingly extensive, that it is inconvenient, if not impossible, to manufacture every species of it at one glass-house or at one establishment. Some, therefore, confine their attention to the production of window glass, and such articles of hollow ware as may be made, with profit, from the same kind of paste. Others make [181] vials and other species of ware, employed by the druggist, apothecary, and chemist. And again, the efforts, at some factories, are confined entirely to the manufacture of flint glass, or to that of plate glass for mirrors. ”

“ It must be admitted that to undertake such work involves the expenditure of much time and money on the part of a manufacturer, while the field is so large and the problems so complicated that any adequate return cannot be promised for the immediate future; on the other hand the very size of the field and the difficulty of the problems offers the promise of the greatest ultimate reward; a really important scientific discovery in connection with glass would be certain to bring in its train industrial developments whose limits it is impossible to foresee. ”

“ It is true, of course, that pressed articles do not show the same smooth and brilliant surface which is characteristic of the fire-polish of blown articles, while the facility with which elaborate surface ornamentation can be applied by this process has not tended to artistic refinement in design, but the great majority of cheap and useful glass articles of domestic use have been made available by the development of the pressing industry. ”

“ The history of these and other districts in the gas country reads quite like an industrial fairy story. Quiet country towns have expanded in a surprisingly short space of time into manufacturing centers of national importance. In this development glass-making has been the foremost industry. By 1888 there were a dozen different establishments at Findlay alone, making bottles, window glass, and flint ware of fine quality, while the population had increased from six thousand to thirty in about eighteen months. ”

“ The dominant fact in this case is that in the last quarter of a century machines have been brought into use that dispense with the employment of the highly trained blowers and the trained gatherers needed for the handmade glass and in that and other ways have enabled the factories using machines to produce window glass at half the cost of the handmade. ”

“ It is strange that so little interest has been taken in a craft in which for some thirty years England surpassed all competitors, creating a wave of fashion which influenced the glass industry throughout the whole of Europe.
In the report of the Excise Commission a list is given of the glass manufactories which paid the excise duty in 1833. There were 105 factories in England, 10 in Scotland and 10 in Ireland. In England the chief centres of the industry were Bristol, Birmingham, London, Manchester, Newcastle, Stourbridge and York. ”

“ This factor has been neglected by some manufacturers, with the result that much of the wired glass of commerce is liable to crack spontaneously some time after it has left the manufacturer’s hands, while there is also much loss by breakage during the process of manufacture. ”

“ As the quality of the product decreases, so also do the demands upon the purity of raw materials, until finally for the manufacture of common green bottles, even such very heterogeneous substances as basaltic rock and the miscellaneous residues of broken, defective and half-melted glass forming the refuse of other glassworks may be utilised more or less satisfactorily. ”

“ In other districts where Nature has been less kind and trade-unionism less powerful, it is possible to make some of the commoner forms of glassware, such as bottles particularly, at a lower cost than in the more highly favored districts, for the simple reason that the manufacturers are at liberty to employ whom they will, and let unskilled labor do the work proper to it. This is a factor not to be lightly considered, for it is to-day sending business into the hands of out-of-the-way glass-houses, and it promises in the future to be very powerful in determining the course of the industry. ”

“ With our present increasing output, the question of a market is no less important than the technical operations. The product is so fragile and so bulky that the market must needs be fairly accessible. Difficulties of transportation wrecked a number of the earlier enterprises. An observer of the first attempts at glass-making in Virginia reported that the industry would have done very well had there been any market for its wares.
These are the five elements which in the kaleidoscope of industrial progress have given us the series of pictures constituting the history of the glass industry. ”

“ This company prospered and was the first successful glass manufacturing company in the United States. Then followed others that were successful. As early as 1865 there was manufactured, in the vicinity of Boston, glass that was the equal of the best flint glass manufactured in England. Two hundred and fifty [Pg 18] years from the time the first rough bottles were exported from Virginia to England seems a long time to us, but how short a time it really is in the life of this ancient art—this drama of glass.
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It is always interesting to trace the history of a great industry. ”

“ It's like a feller by the name Dalzell, a buyer for Kammerman's store, says to me this morning. 'Lubliner,' he says, 'I couldn't afford to take no chances buying highgrade garments from a feller that is used to making a popular-price line,' he says, 'because no matter how well equipped your factory would be the trouble is a popular-price manufacturer couldn't think big enough to turn out expensive garments. To such a manufacturer goods at two dollars a yard is the limit, and goods at ten dollars a yard he couldn't imagine at all. ”

“ This industry must have won some reputation, for in 758 the abbot of Jarrow appealed to the bishop of Mainz to send him a worker in glass. There are few records of glass manufacture in Germany before the beginning of the 16th century. The positions of the factories were determined by the supply of wood for fuel, and subsequently, when the craft of glass-cutting was introduced, by the accessibility of water-power. The vessels produced by the 16th-century glass-workers in Germany, Holland and the Low Countries are closely allied in form and decoration. ”

“ There are from 1,500 to 2,000 hands employed in these works, representing such a combination of science, genius, skilled and varied industry as perhaps no other establishment in the world can present. For, although they are called Glass Works, when you enter the light-house department, you have ironworks on a great scale in minute ramification. In the buildings in which a common-sized lumber-yard of boards is made up into boxes for the exportation of glass to America or other foreign countries, you have wood-works of equal extent. ”

“ The process of pressing being a purely mechanical one and requiring no very elaborate plant and little skilled labour, has placed upon the market a host of cheap and extremely useful articles, thus serving to widen very considerably the useful applications of glass. ”

“ Shall the value of the metal be taken immediately after it is smelted, or in a more advanced state of manufacture? The position of the government seems to be that the value of the component materials should be taken as they go into the hands of the manufacturer. But one manufacturer may buy them in their rough state, another in their polished state, and another in their final state, ready to be put together in the form of a glass. ”

“ Where, however, large quantities of flint-glass are made every day, it is possible and proper to make more perfect arrangements for the mechanical handling and mixing of the lead with the other ingredients by the provision of suitable mixing and transporting machinery, so arranged as to be dust-tight. It is only fair to state, however, that partly under their own initiative, partly under pressure from the authorities, glass makers in this country are complying with these requirements in an adequate manner. ”

“ Now we make all our motors and most of our parts because we find it cheaper to do so. But also we aim to make some of every part so that we cannot be caught in any market emergency or be crippled by some outside manufacturer being unable to fill his orders. The prices on glass were run up outrageously high during the war; we are among the largest users of glass in the country. ”

“ The glass industry as a whole, supplying some of the absolute necessaries of modern life, should be capable of offering the greatest rewards to success, and the example of other industries has shown that ultimate success is bound to reward properly-conducted and perseverant scientific research. Nowhere is this more urgently needed than in the whole field of glass manufacture. ”

“ The tank-furnace, which holds the field in bottle manufacture, is scarcely met with in the production of the better qualities of hollow glass-ware; medicine bottles and other articles of moderate quality might be produced in tanks, but the quantity of glass required for such purposes is seldom large enough to justify such large plant. For the best qualities of colourless glass-ware, however, the tank-furnace could not be used on account of the fact that both as regards colour and freedom from defects, the product of a tank-furnace is never equal to the best product of pot-furnaces. ”

“ Every factor that tends to diminish either the total weight of glass to be removed per square yard of finished plate, or reduces the cost of removal, must be of the utmost importance in this manufacture. The flatness of the plates as they leave the annealing kiln has already been referred to, and the reason why the processes of grinding and polishing have formed the subject for innumerable patents will now be apparent. ”

“ Some of these processes are in actual use in America, and others are being experimented with in Europe, but their complete technical and commercial success has yet to be proved; there can, however, be little doubt that they have overcome the greatest of the many difficulties that stood in the way of the mechanical production of sheet-glass, and that they are therefore destined very shortly to solve the problem completely, in which case they would, of course, rapidly supersede the hand process. ”

“ Forthwith they proceeded to the rear of the loft, where the hundred odd members of the mutual aid society were engaged in the manifold employments of a cloak and suit factory, and the smiles and nods with which they greeted their treasurer rekindled in Birsky and Zapp the glow of virtue that to some degree had abated at Eschenbach's refusal to examine their sample line.
"You see, Mr. Eschenbach," Birsky said proudly, "what a good feeling the operators has for us. And you wouldn't believe how it shows in the work, too, Mr. Eschenbach. Our goods is elegant made up." ”

“ The government probably encouraged the subdivision of labour, which made it more difficult for single workmen to establish glass-works in foreign countries.
In fact, the manufacture and export of beads have at all times formed the very backbone of the Venetian glass industry. We cannot trace this trade further back than the beginning of the fourteenth century—by means, that is, of definite documentary evidence—but by that time a fleet of galleys was yearly despatched, on the one hand to the Black Sea, on the other to Flanders and the Thames ”

“ Having dwelt somewhat emphatically on the limitations of our present scientific knowledge as applied to glass manufacture, it is perhaps scarcely necessary at the present time to emphasise the fact that this state of affairs should act as the strongest incentive to further investigation of the whole subject. The difficulty, however, lies in the fact that such investigation can scarcely be carried on by voluntary workers in ordinary laboratories, but must be undertaken with the active help of glass manufacturers at their works. ”