Eagle River Democrat. [volume] (Eagle River, Vilas County, Wis.) 1893-1896, 1895-07-22
How Beats Are Made.


Half a dozen years ago many fat
dame rode out in her carriage with
thousands of black and white beads
Topped and tasseled upon her dress.
There were pendants of beads on her
hat; beads dangled from her parasol
and her shopping bag tingled with beads.
Children in school wore them as orna-
ments- necklaces, bracelets and rings of
a score of different colors.
Today their use in the United States
has largely gone out of fashion, except
within certain narrow limits, and the
manufacture of them, still a great in
dustry, depends for it's support mainly
upon South America, Africa and the
islands of the sea. In those countries
beads have been worn for hundreds of
years, and fashion has little influence
upon their use. Indeed, if explorers are
to be believed, many a black savage is
clad in a necklace Of beads and very
little else.
the world. They have made beads so
long that even their historians do not
mention a time when the industry was
not ancient. And the Chinese today do
the work just as their forefathers did,
and the styles are exactly the same.
After the Chinese no people are so
expert as the Venetians. At present
there are more than 1000 workmen in
the island of Murano alone who are en-
gagged in bead making. The few manu-
facturers in other parts of the world
have all learned the secret of the craft
in Venice.
For bead making there must be
rope walk connected with the glass
factory. A rope walk is narrow,
straight gallery about $50 feet long, and
so situated that the middle is not far
from the furnaces in which the glass is
melted. The first process is the making
Of ordinary tubes like those used in al
most every drug store. Two brawny
workmen, with bare, brown arms, seize
a huge wedge of the metal as the
molten glass is called, between their
blow pipes, and after it has been blown
hollow they gradually stretch it out into
a long, swinging rope.
When it has been reduced to the proper
size for the beads about to be made, 1t
is laid away to cool, after which work
man comes along and in wonderfully
deft manner chips it into fragments of
uniform size. Often for small beads
these are not much larger than grain of
wheat, but so carefully is the work done
that the little cylinders are rarely cracked
or spoiled.
The pieces are now picked up by boys
and placed in a tub with sand and ashes
and stirred up carefully. In this way the
holes in the embryo beads are stuffed full,
thus preventing the danger of the sides
fattening together when heat is applied.
They are next placed in a skillett-just
such one as the housewife uses in fry
ing eggs and stirred over a very hot fire
until the ragged edges where the pieces
were broken from the tube are rounded,
giving the bead globular form AS soon
as they are cool the ashes and sand are
shaken out of them in sieve and then
they are separated according to size by
long table around which a whole flock of
boys and girls are sitting. If the glass is
colored, as it often is. the piles of beads
on the table suggest a rainbow, with every
hue. from jet black, through red, green,
yellow and blue up to white.
Each child has needle and thread,
and by long practice the beads are placed
on strings with, almost uncomfortable
act count, too, SO that the manufacturer
knows just how many beads he is send
ing out The threads are tied into bun
dies and shipped to almost every port
where a vessel touches.-Ch Chicago Record.