Sand into glass

Ask a chemist about the ingredients of glass and he will talk about silicon. Perhaps the simplest definition of silicon is that it is one of the things that the earth is largely made of. Silica, an oxide of silicon, comprises about three-fifths of the earth’s crust. Next to oxygen, silicon is commonest of elements. No politician would refer to the silicon-bound shores of Maine, yet the rocks of Maine (or of almost any other locality) have in their makeup a large silicon content. So common a substance as quartz, or oxide of silicon, represents one member of the silicon family in relatively pure state. And a combination of carbon and silicon gives carborundum, hardest substance next to the diamond.

Now the glass maker probably does not take much interest in silicon, nor is it necessary that he should. Glass was made long before probing scientists discovered and labeled the silicon family. From the layman’s standpoint, glass is made chiefly from sand. But sand is simply the crumbled fragments of rocks—that is silicon oxide in a conveniently powdered form. Children will probably never fall off to sleep under the impression that the Si O[subscript 2] Man is coming for them, but from a chemical standpoint the great sand-piles represent merely a usable and transportable silicon supply.

To the workmen in the glass factory, however, sand is simply sand, and plenty of it. Standing amid heaping dunes of white particles (like Cape Cod brought inland or a small section of the Sahara) the workman shovels them into a waiting hand-cart. A mask covers his mouth to keep the fine dust out of his lungs. Other men, also grotesquely muzzled, trundle the cart into the mixing room. Here the sand is mixed with litharge or lime, with soda or potash or borax, and with any one or more of a hundred other ingredients depending upon the purpose for which the glass is intended. Originally sodium salts were obtained from sea water and potassium salts from wood ashes, but today these salts are obtained mostly from salt deposits. The largest deposit of potash salts is in Germany. During the war there was a shortage of potash outside of Germany and it was necessary to return to wood ash as a source. Since then, however, an adequate American supply has been obtained from Searles Lake in California. Sodium salts have always been very plentiful and the largest commercial consumers are obtaining their supply from so-called “salt wells” located in various parts of the United States.

After the batch has been properly made, it goes next to the furnace. Here, in the application of heat, is performed the major glass miracle—the transformation of opaque particles into a transparent solid. Silica, like the rest of the earth’s crust, was formed by the cooling of the molten, liquid masses of which the interior of the earth is still composed. In its molten state, it is not only a liquid, but also a transparent liquid. So when the silica in the glass furnace is heated and melted, a transparent liquid results. And if, as in the glass factory, it cools off in the space of a few hours instead of through the centuries that it took the earth’s crust to cool and solidify, it cools so rapidly that it is still transparent when it has become again solid. If it were left alone for a few hundred thousand years it might go back again to the rock whence it came.

The furnace tending job in the glass factory is much like the corresponding job in a steel mill. The sandy batch is cooked in clay pots or tanks, not only because clay can stand higher temperatures than steel, but also because there is some unexplained hostility between steel and silicon so that when molten glass comes into contact with steel its surface becomes roughened and spoiled. Twenty-six days are spent in the building of a clay pot and six months in drying. Modern glass making is shifting away from the comparatively small, hand-built pots to large tanks with greater capacity and about a year’s life.

Mixing and heating produce the transparent liquid from which glass is made. Shaping it is the glass-blower’s business. It is an extremely hot business, because although molten glass is easily workable the cold glass is of course the familiar brittle substance through which boys so readily throw bricks. So the glass worker must work with his material still hot, as though the steel worker had to build a locomotive out of molten steel. Over the glass-blower’s head is a ventilator to spray him with cool air. Water-cooled metal screens protect him somewhat from the withering heat which gradually crumbles the inside of clay pots eventually causing their discard. His mouth is ringed with tough flesh from long applications to blow-pipes. His palms are calloused from contact with hot irons. But he is a skilled worker, a well-paid worker, and he has the craftsman’s pleasure in watching something shape itself under his hand.

The glass making itself is divided into two general operations—gathering the molten glass from the pot, then working it into its final form. A young workman thrusts a long iron blow-pipe into the fiery pot. He twirls the pipe around to gather on it a blob of molten glass, like twirling a knife to get honey out of a jar. Out comes the pipe, a glowing, viscous mass collected on its end. Then the pipe is passed to the master workman, who blows into it, twirls it in arcs like a bandmaster’s baton, spins it deftly between his hands. He must work fast before the glass cools and hardens. His manipulations sprout on the end of the pipe a swelling growth of plastic glass which he places into a mold at his feet. When he or his helper has clamped the mold shut, he puffs into the pipe. The glass swells up inside the mold, taking on its final shape. The blower lifts it out, inspects it for flaws, puts the pipe with the finished glass still attached into a rack to cool down. Then he or a boy detaches the glass from the pipe and it is put on an endless belt on which it travels gradually from hot to cool temperatures.

The processes just described are essentially hand processes; the glass industry, indeed, from the time of the Egyptians and Phoenicians was dominated by the hand worker. Even as recently as 1900—a full century after the period generally covered by references to the “mechanical revolution”—the worker in glass had no machine competition. The industry in this country was virtually controlled by Local 300—a glass-workers’ union which had built up a labor monopoly and dictated even to the glass manufacturers themselves. One manufacturer—the American Window Glass Company—put a $500,000 block of its stock in trust for the union and gave the union representation on its board of directors.

In 1908 came the introduction of the first glass-making machinery—an innovation against which Local 300 sternly set its face. None of its members were permitted to work in plants where machinery was used; defiant, the union adopted an uncompromising No Surrender attitude toward the machine invasion. Instead of adapting itself to the machine (it might, for example, have extended its membership to the relatively unskilled machine-tenders) the union insisted that in the glass business, at least, the modern world should move at a mediaeval pace. Eventually, of course, the machine triumphed. It learned to perform more and more of the operations formerly sacred to the handworkers’ skill. By 1922 the tide had definitely turned toward the machine; by 1924 Local 300 had lost its position as wage-fixer for the industry; in 1927 the union made a belated and unsuccessful attempt to unionize unskilled labor; and in 1928 Local 300 disbanded. Said its president, in its obituary notice: “No human agency could have saved the hand-craft … The mistake we made was in clinging to the old guild idea. That has no place in modern American industry.”

Largest units in the glass industry today are Owens-Illinois Glass Co. of Toledo and the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co. Owens-Illinois (whose merger with Continental Can Co. is indefinitely postponed) is in the container field, manufactures ink bottles, perfume bottles, druggists’ bottles, bottles of every kind. It makes about 50% of the beverage bottles used by Canada Dry, White Rock and Clicquot. The Pittsburgh company (in which the omnipresent Mellons are interested) makes plate, window, spectacle and mirror glasses and a side line of paints, lacquers and solvents. In both companies the majority of operations are mechanical.

Thus, after some 5,000 years of unquestioned supremacy, the skilled glass worker fought and, in 20 years, lost his battle with machinery. It should not, of course, be concluded that there is no skilled hand labor remaining in the glass business. Few industries become so thoroughly mechanized that the human element in the equation reaches the zero value of pulling a knob or turning a handle. Furthermore, there are many glass making operations in which the hand worker is still indispensable. Bottles and other ordinary containers; window-panes and other sheet products belong to the machine: But in the manufacture of laboratory apparatus, of decorative ware, of odd-shaped, non-standardized and small-volumed glass products, the glass-worker still follows the trade of his forefathers in much the way that they followed it. There exists, and there will always exist, a place for the skilled craftsman. But it is not the high place from which he so recently fell.

In the production of artistic glassware the craftsman still reigns supreme. The Corning Works have their Steuben division, where white-haired old glassmakers slowly mold and blow vases, bowls, candlesticks, and such decorative articles. But the center of modern glass craftsmanship is in France. There René Lalique, slender, trim-mustached, with the look of a scholar, is hard at work in his Paris atelier. He is drawing designs for every sort of object—bowls, perfume bottles, doorknobs, chandeliers, candelabra, intaglio seals, dinner plates—and all to be executed by his hundreds of glass craftsmen. From the two Lalique workshops, one at Fontainebleau and one in Alsace, flows an uninterrupted stream of vases, clocks, bottles, glasses, plates, picture frames, bowls, on which are etched or molded birds, beasts, flowers, fruits, fishes, nymphs, satyrs, and every sort of decorative device. The shops of Europe and America sell these products. The New York specialty shop, Jay-Thorpe, has a room designed and executed by Lalique to display his wares in which even the doors are of etched glass. And Lalique did an all-glass bathroom for Corinne Griffith.

Commercially, René Lalique is as successful as any man in France. Yet he knows little of “business” and cares less. He willingly delegates all business matters to assistants. Occasionally he visits the shop in the Place Vendome where the products of his two factories are sold, but he is more interested in what is being sold than in sales volume. He wanders from cabinet to cabinet, sharply examining the contents. Stopping in front of one, he carefully picks two small crystal figures out of it. He turns to the head of the shop: “These must be destroyed. Phone immediately to the factory, tell them to make no more of them and to destroy the molds. They are not good.” Fortunate is the craftsman who works for such a master.

Steadily laboring in his Paris atelier, refusing to see most visitors and talking to those he does see of only one subject: his work, René Lalique turns out an amazing number of designs—enough to keep 600 men busy crystallizing them into glass. Their skilled hands and eyes and lungs are indispensable to their master. It would take a very clever machine to satisfy M. Lalique. It would have to execute his designs, which employ every sort of motif from frogs to rosebuds, and to execute them in the most delicate detail. It would have to mold and turn out unbroken the feathery tails of peacocks and the flowing robes of a wood nymph. It would have to etch a thousand and one designs on glass, sometimes lightly and sometimes in deep relief. And it would have to be able to change from one design to another as easily and quickly as a workman lays down one piece of work to pick up another—for M. Lalique wants none of that infinite repetition that is the chief strength of the machine.