The Mount Holly news. [volume] (Mount Holly, Burlington Co., N.J.) 1891-1942, 1908-06-23
WORKING WITH GLASS
The Way the Different Color e.
fects Are Produced.
FREAKS OF THE BLoWPIPE.

quaint specimen SHAPES mat arc
Sometimes Dropped From the PuntiI.
How Bottles Are Made by the Clever
and Dexterous Workmen.
If a stranger enters the glass works
on a dark night he will find not only
beauty in the blowing operations, but
a great deal Of humor, with an uncan-
ny weirdness in fame and shadow that
must affect his Imagination to some
extent The building is circular. with
a chimney sticking up through the mid
die of 1t, from the top Of which pc
culiar intermittent light Is pickering.
In the center of this building, under
meath the chimney, stands conical
furnace of brick containing perhaps. no
fewer than eight holes which are like
fiercely glaring suns and from which
pour expanding broad rays of orange
colored light. If your eyes are strong
enough to look through the holes from
which the orange beams of light
emerge you see several hundredweight
of molten metal shining silvery green
in as many earthen dome shaped melt
ing pots.
The nature of different kinds of glass
is dependent upon the quality of the
raw material called batch" put into
the melting pots Batch" is a mixture
of such materials as Calais sand, or
common river sand Astounding in silica.
salt cake, or sodium carbonate and
much lime. Blue colors may be OBJ
tanned by adding oxide Of cobalt, green
by means of a chrome, black by man
ganese and amber. The mass Of molten
metal got from this Opaque, earthly
SKINNED Of impurities, but it is never
theless a problem whence comes that
wonderful and enduring transparency
which every body likes to see in glass
Until the hour strikes for the work
men to commence operations you may
find them experimenting for amuse-
ment or profit with the blowpipe. You
will see many an enormity produced In
glass the like of which can scarcely
ever have been dropped from puntil
before. Specimens are blown out to
the thinness of a tissue paper bag,
which another puff of wind explodes
with a crack, or a glowing glass pear
is for very wantonness knocked off the
puntil SO that it may vanish with re-
port on the floor, its hue and heat be-
ing extinguished Immediately. The floor
all around the furnace chamber Is COW
cred with brittle shining splinters and
particles of glass, which crackle under
foot at every step. One Of the men
may bring you a mass of metal on a
blowpipe and ask you to expend a few
cheekfuls of wind upon 1t. The pipe
takes no more blowing than from
bone, though 1t lacks a mouthpiece,
and you may expand the bubble until
it is black and cold, so fragile that II
will break into a myriad pieces II
you touch it. The molten glass is so
ductile that it may be spun out into
thread, and the men often vie with
each other to see who can make the
longest and thinnest strand.
At the signal to commence work the
men, already partly stripped to the
waist, poke their four foot blowpipe
through the hole of the crucible oppo-
site to which they work, twisting 1t
round until it has taken up sufficient of
the ropy and yiscid glass for one bot
tie. The man who is clever at his work
will of course gather up neither too
much nor too little for the thickness of
the bottle required. He can tell with
out looking through the furnace holes
when he has enough by the weight
added to his pipe Thus all around the
fiery furnace there are figures moving
continually across the lurid light, most
of them dexterously welding their
blowpipes and balancing at the end of
each one the exact quantity of vitriied
matter to make a bottle. The amateur
would find it difficult to balance the
molten mass The chances are that it
would drop on the focr. never to be
picked up again.
At the same moment you will see bot
ties in all stages of growth-some gilt
tering gold, others cooling down to
orange or red, some in the forms OF
plummets or dazzling pears, others as
incandescent bosses threatening to be-
come fragile bladders. 1t is all as
charming as pyrotechnic display. You
viii see the black blowpipe twirled
round, blown down, held up ike gun
barrel, then In the form of an mean
descent lamp globe turned round on
beeswaxed cast iron implement called
a marler, on whose edge the bottle
neck is formed 1t is held up once
more, blown into, then shut up in a
cast iron mold placed at the operators
feet somewhat below the level Of the
ground. This mold is opened and closed
by a wire spring. which the opera
tor presses with his feet, and directly
the red hot bottle is inclosed he blows
down the pipe once more so as to fill 1t
completely.
A man goes round from mold to mold
inserting a rod into the neck of each
bottle and collecting a trayful to go to
the annealing chamber. Here the bot
ties are stacked up for gradual cool
ing process, which may possibly last
thIrty-six hours. This gives them the
desired strength. The annealing proc
ess is a cure for their natural fragility
and enables them to stand the test OF
boiling water.-London Globe.