The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1851-03-04 00:00:00

March 4, 1851.

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It is proverbial that the things of most importance
near home are often the least known and appreciated. and
certainly this remark is applicable to the subject we have
in hand, namely, the manufactures of St. Helens. This
small town is situated not more than ten miles from
Liverpool ; it consumes three or four thousand tons of
coal weekly in manufactures of glass and chemical sub-
stances ; and yet one-half of the inhabitants of this great
town know St. Helens only by name, and are totally
ignorant of the gigantic works there carried on. In our
last, we stated our intention to publish a series of papers •
upon this subject ; and, through the kindness of Mr.
Henry Deacon, of the St. Helens Crown and Sheet-glass
Works, we shall be enabled to lay before our readers the
most complete description and history of the interesting
manufaCtures of crown and sheet glass ever published.
When Mr. H. Deacon's papers are completed, we propose
to give a description of the manufactures of plate glass,
glass bottles, flint-glass articles, glass staining, the alkali
or soda-ash manufacture, chloride of potash, and chloride
of lime manufactures, and the other manipulations for
which this little town is so remarkable. We have in•
spected most of the works personally, and have much
pleasure in recording our gratitude and admiration for the
delicate attention and frank explanations which we uni-
versally met with from the proprietors of the various
works; and we should not do justice if we omitted to
mention the valuable statistical information and assistance'
we received from Mr. Sinclair, the resident Manager of
the St. Helens Junction Railway. We found him is
complete repository of the statistics of St. Helens ; his
energy and activity seemed to us to want wider scope ; for
it appeared that every ton of material passed over " the
line" appeared quite familiar to him.
We now proceed to give Mr. Henry Deacon's papers

ON TIIE MANUFACTURE OF BLOWN WINDOW-GLASS.

The different varieties of window-glass are usually dis-
tinguished by the terms plate, sheet, and crown ; but
these words do not define the method of manufacture.
Plate glass is sometimes supposed to signify, necessarily,
cast glass ; but all blown, window-glass which is at least
one-eighth of an inch thick,-or is ground and polished, is
also called plate glass. The recent case at the Winchester
jail skews the practical importance of the definition. The
word " plate' appears to have been applied to pieces of
glass in the same way as tcrpieces of metal. A. plate of
iron may be hammered or rolled, and a plate of glass
either blown or cast. The word refers to the article, and
not to,the way it is made. Thickness only was recognised
by the excise laws, and the same distinction is now made
by the customs. Irrespective of thickness, all ground and
polished window-glass is called plate glass. For distinc-
tion, the terms blown and sheet plate were introduced;
and when some of the machinery employed in the proces-
ses of grinding and polishing blown plate glass was im-
proved and patented, it was called "patent plate,"and is
now known- in the market by that name.
With this apology for the title of my paper, I will refer
slightly to the bygone literature of " the art of glass,"
before describing the modern practice;- and I cannot help,
noticing of the old writers, that they are as great plagia-
rists as their successors.
The-first old work on glass I met with, -was Blancourt's-
" Art of Glass,"' published in England in 1699, the origi-
nal being printed in France, I believe in,1667i or soon af-
terwards; certainly not before. The 3rd chapter contains-
a circumstantial account of the tradition thet all glass.'
makers are "noble," the author's words being, at p. 28-of:
the English edition—" The workmen who are employed•
in this- noble art, are all gentlemen, for they admit of,
none but such. They have obtained many-and large pri-
vileges, the principal whereof is to work themselves with-
out derogating• from their nobility. The first who ob-
tained these privileges, according to historians, were the
workmen of the-great glass-houses (windove-glass houses);
and although-they were not in use till long after the little-
ones (table-glass or flint-glass houses), yet they have out•
stripped them in this-point of honour."
He tben'gives a list of several noble glass-blowers, be-
ginning with Anthony de Brossard, who in 1453 was a
glass-blower, and Lord of St. Martin and St. Brice, as
well as gentleman to Charles d'Artois, Count of Eu,•
prince of the blood royal. He traces the descent of De
Brossard for, many generations, proving his gentle birth,
and dilates at length on his coat of arms and the various
grants concerning it. After mentioning others who flou-
rished in the fifteenth century, he names-those living in
his own time : - the Messieurs De Virgille, De la Maisie.
De Sagrier, De-Bougard, and many more whose nobility
was confirmed during the search in 1667, eshort time be-
fore his book was published, His preface and introduc-
tory chapter- on the antiquity of glass, and the various an-
cient writers who mention it; hi) praises of its beauty
and many valuable qualities, as well as his naive belief in
its being rendered malleable by the " red, elixir" of the
alchemists are -quaint and attractive, though too long for
extracts. The numerous- recipes are all curious, and many
absurd ; but hisengraving of the interior of a glass-house,
and his description of the method of blowing window-
glass, I consider the greatest curiosities of the book. At
page 24, English edition,.is this description—(great glass-
houses, it must be remembered, are vendavr-glass houses;
little glass-houses are table or flint glass-houses) :—"The
gentlemen of the great glass-houses work only twelve
hours, but that without resting, as in the little ones, and
always stending and naked. This work passes through
three hands. The first through the hands of the gentle-
men apprentices, who gather the matter with their hollow
iron that is in the pots in the little working holes, when it
is fit to be used or worked, and that till three beats ; then
he puts it on a marble. Then a second workman, more
advanced in the-art, takes the iron and gives it yet three
heats more,...and setting it on the marble,, makes it into a
lump. Then the master workman takes• it and makes it
perfect by blowing it, and making it ready to be worked.
Then there comes a servant with a sharp tool of wood,

which he thrusts intethe end of the lutrip or mass, and
the master workman,. with an almost inconceivable ad-
dress and art, works-it at the heat of the mouth of the
great working-hole„ then casts the plate upon a place
prepared upon the ground with live coals, to give time to
a servant of = the glass-house to take it, and carry it to a
furnace which is at some distance from the body of the
oven ; whence youlake it out again when it is cold. And
it is of these plates they make window-glass for the
glaziers."'
My next acquisition was a little book published in Am-
sterdam, in 1669, being a Latin translation of an English-
man's (DreMerrett's) reprint and: annotation of a still
older work by. Anthony Neri, published 1612 ; Merrett's
reprint being published in England in 1662, just five years
before the earliest date of Blancourt's publication.. From
Merrett's Latin and English works, and from a French
reprint of Kunkel.''; edition of Neri„ with his own nume-
rous experiments and remarks, T found that, antiquated
as I took Blancourt's book to be,.the most of it was much
more so than I had suspected, and that my favourite au-
thor werea complete set of borrowed plumes. The Latin
edition of Merrett's work contains an engraving, with the
exact attitudes,. but not the dresses of Blancourt's, and
pointedly refers-to a much older work ')y Geo. Agricola,
as containing the original engraving. To Merrett belongs
the credit of Blancourt's learned essays on the, antiquities
and classical allusions respecting glass, and to Neri and
Kunkel belong the credit of. his.v!trious recipes. So far
as I am-,aware, Blancourt's sole claim to originality rests
on his description of a method of making glass eyes. I at
length procured a copy of Agricela's celebrated work, De
Re Metallica.. The date on the title-page, which appears
to be of more modern
i paper than the rest of the book, is
/1657, and the date n the body of the work itself is
1550 : this. I believe
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more natural than his imitator. On the subject of the
nobility of glass-blowers. 1 found Blancoure's statement
confirmed. In " Howel's Familiar Letters," dated from
Venice, then the queen of glass-making cities, the Ist -
June,l62l, and quoted by' Apsley Pellet, in his " Curio-
sities of Glass.making," is this sentence—" The art of:
glass-snaking is very highly valuedin, Venice, for whoso-
ever comes to be a master of that: profession is reputed a.
gentleman Ipso ante; for the art's sake." I also learn-.
from the combined testimony of some of our oldest hands,
that, as lads, they knew and worked with the last gentle-...
man glass-maker in England. His name was Henzel,,
and he worked, or, as he would say, he practised his pro-
fession at Sir Matthew White Ridley's, at Newcastle.
He maintained his dignity by:various ingenious mermen-
ores ; it was his part to complete the last process in mak-..
ing the table of window-glasseand to deliver it at the kiln,
mouth for annealing. He was closely followed by a boy,
who handed the gentleman. his-stick as soon as he was at
liberty to receive it, and he thus walked back in state to
his minute's.rest, and to, receive another table to com-
plete. In dining, he always. cut From a whole joint, his
boy waiting, en regle, behind his chair. Such was the
last of a school quite passed away,
In my next paper I will proceed with an accountof the
modern practice of glass-making. HENRY DEACON.