There has been a lot of discussion about them and controvery over their name. I coined Indo-Pacific, and that name is now widely used. The details of this debate and the history of their discovery are in a box at the end of this article. It is still in use. It requires a couple dozen men and women, three furnaces, two of them unique to the system, and specialized tools.
Glassmakers prepare a large cake of glass by pouring molten glass onto a flat platform.
A sketch of the unique tube drawing furnace at Papanaidupet. The resulting tubes are chopped between two blades by other workers, then packed in ash and stirred over heat for 20 to 30 minutes to round off their sharp edges. They may then be sieved and finally strung up by women with 15 or so long needles, passing them through the beads held in a winnowing basket. There are at least two intriguing unanswered questions about this technology. For one, the tube-drawing process is very similar in conception to the machine that Edward Danner of the Libby Glass Company patented in 1917 to draw glass tubing automatically.