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Show Glass-Making, First Industry Established On Continent of North America, Celebrates Silver Jubilee of a Revolutionary Discovery By ELMO SCOTT WATSON (Released by Western Newspaper Union.) THIS fall marks the 25th anniversary of a revolutionary revolu-tionary change in the business of glass-making, an industry which traces its beginnings be-ginnings back more than 5,000 years and which was -the first to be established on the North American continent. conti-nent. For it was just 25 years ago that the flat glass industry, indus-try, with its modern ramifications ramifi-cations into window glass, automotive safety plate glass, opaque colored structural glass of many kinds and plate glass with all its uses for mirrors and wall panels, "came of age" with the development de-velopment of the Colburn process for drawing a continuous contin-uous sheet. So the year 1914 might be heralded her-alded as the true beginning of the "Age of Glass" and this fall it is celebrating its silver jubilee. This milestone in the development develop-ment of America's oldest industry indus-try is, however, only one of many in its long and varied history. Glass-making crossed the Atlantic At-lantic to America with the first colonists, and the first glass manufacture man-ufacture in the New World was established at Jamestown, Virginia, Vir-ginia, in 1608. Capt. John Smith mentioned that he engaged in a rough and tumble fight with an Indian chief "one evening while returning to his house from the glass furnace." America's first factory made glass beads to be traded to the Indians for furs,' food and land. The artisans were Poles and Italians. They made the "money" which purchased the land of Virginia. Vir-ginia. The Indians are said to have obtained some revenge for the sharp trading by destroying the glass plant in the Jamestown massacre of 1622. Other glass-making projects were organized in colonial America Amer-ica in endless succession. Most glamorous of the glass entrepreneurs entrepre-neurs was Baron Heinrich Wil-helm Wil-helm von Stiegel, who wasn't really re-ally a baron at all but who nevertheless never-theless lived in splendor like a feudal lord. 'The Baron' Arrives. The baron arrived in Philadelphia Philadel-phia from Germany in 1750 at the age of 21 and went to Lancaster county, where a year later he married Elizabeth Huber, daughter daugh-ter of an iron manufacturer. Stiegel learned the iron-making business and then began experimenting experi-menting with glass. He returned to Germany to learn more about glass and brought artisans with him when he returned to America. The Stiegel glass business was a huge success. He built the town of Manheim, Pa., near Philadelphia. Phil-adelphia. His mansion there was the talk of the colony. He built a log castle on a hill called Thurm Berg. Whenever the baron arrived ar-rived at one of his estates, three cannon boomed to announce to his friends that a celebration was to be held. Baron Stiegel loved the spectacular, spec-tacular, liked to be the best dressed man anywhere around, liked to make generous gifts. He was a religious man, too. When he gave his fellow Lutherans land for a church in 1772, he demanded demand-ed one red rose each June in payment. The Stiegel family still receives this tribute every year at the Festival of the Red Rose in Manheim. It is easy to understand under-stand why town folks spoke of him as "the baron." When hard times came, other manufacturers pulled in their horns but Baron Stiegel tried to expand his business instead. He lost all his property, served a sentence in debtor's prison and died in poverty. A piece of genuine gen-uine Stiegel glass is a treasure for collectors now. Glass has hundreds of uses in the modern world but its application applica-tion for windows in buildings and transportation vehicles transcends tran-scends all the others. The oldest known window glass was found in the ruins of Pompeii where panes half an inch thick were used to admit light to the famous baths. This was the kind of glass through which objects were "seen darkly." There was constant striving then to improve the transparency. The fall of Rome caused a thousand-year delay de-lay in the perfection of windows. When Edward I of England brought Eleanor back from Spain as his bride, King Henry III was so delighted with the teenage teen-age girl that he gave the youthful youth-ful couple a house which had real glass windows as a wedding wed-ding present. Pope Pius II expressed ex-pressed surprise in 1448 at finding find-ing Vienna church windows fitted with glass. In 1467, frames to be fitted with paper were ordered for the duke of Burgundy's pal-sce. pal-sce. And in the reign of Queen Three generations in the same art Ornamental glass blowing has been carried on in the Scott family since 1820. Andrew Walter Scott 2nd, of Los Angeles, learned the art from his father in 1873 and has taught his daughter, Mrs. Mable Manley. Her son, Dick, is a veteran of four years' experience at the age of 10. (Wide World Photo) Elizabeth, the duke of Northumberland Northum-berland was warned by his steward stew-ard that he had better have the windows taken down and stored when he left his estate. Even Charles II, the luxury-loving monarch who reigned from 1660 to 1685, had no glazed windows in his palace. These facts show how rare glass for windows was when America was colonized. The demand for window glass rose during the Eighteenth century, cen-tury, but progress was slow in Europe and America. An unsuccessful unsuc-cessful attempt to manufacture window glass was made at Al-lowaystown, Al-lowaystown, N. J., in 1738, and in 1790 a wealthy young man named Robert Hewes built a factory fac-tory near Concord, N. H. This unsuccessful effort cost him his fortune. The Boston Crown Glass company com-pany began operations in 1792 and became a financial success. Records Rec-ords show that it produced $82,000 worth of window glass in 1798. Glass made in the Boston factory was said to be superior to the imported product and was known as "Boston crown window glass." Specimens still can be seen in old colonial houses of New England. "Crown glass" was made by gathering a large globule of molten molt-en glass on the end of a blowpipe, the glass then being blown into hollow spherical shapes. Then an iron rod, or punty, tipped with molten glass was applied to the opposite side of the sphere and the blowpipe was detached, leaving a hole. The globe attached at-tached to the punty was reheated reheat-ed and the punty given a sudden whirling motion that caused the globe to open and flatten to the form of a disc. The disc was removed, annealed in an oven, and then cut into small sheets. The panes containing the "bull's eye" or "crown" where the punty had been attached were used for decorative effects and were employed largely for transoms tran-soms and side lights of doorways. This method of making window f j Glass-blower Dick Hanley demonstrates dem-onstrates how those pretty red ornaments are made for your Christmas tree. (Wide World Photo) glass was expensive and wasteful, waste-ful, and only small lights could be produced. Inventors began a long effort to improve window glass and reduce re-duce the cost of manufacture. The hand process of blowing glass into cylinders instead of globules which could be flattened flat-tened was a slight advance over the old crown glass method, and continued to be the accepted process until 1903. Glass was blown to form an elongated cylinder, cyl-inder, the ends cut away, the cylinder cyl-inder split open and flattened. The next step was the machine cylinder process, which - made possible larger sheets of glass and elimination of much arduous toil. Compressed air replaced human lung power and machinery machin-ery did the heavy lifting. Window glass made by the hand or machine cylinder methods meth-ods never became precisely flat. The sheets had to be packed all the same way in boxes for ship-, ping to allow for the bow in the glass. So Irving W. Colburn, a Pennsylvania inventor, began attempts at-tempts to make flatter flat glass in 1898 in a small experimental plant at Blackford, near Philadelphia. Philadel-phia. He made little progress until un-til 1905 when he saw a paper-making paper-making machine in operation and determined that sheet glass could be manufactured by a similar method. It had been his idea from the start that flat glass should be produced in sheet form instead of having to be flattened after it was made. Spent a Million. From 1905 to 1912, Colburn built machine after machine and spent more than $1,000,000 of his own and his friends' money. Success Suc-cess always seemed at hand but not quite within reach. The Colburn Col-burn domestic and foreign patents were sold at auction in 1912 after the Colburn Machine Glass company was declared bankrupt. Colburn's backers finally had lost confidence in his process, but Michael J. Owens, the master inventive in-ventive mind of the glass industry indus-try and creator of the Owens bottle-making machine, believed that Colburn's basic idea was sound and that only refinements were needed. Owens induced Edward D. Libbey, his associate for many years, and the Toledo Glass company, of which Libbey was president, to purchase the Colburn patents from the trustee in bankruptcy. Libbey, Owens and their associates asso-ciates redesigned the flat-drawing machine and after many months of effort and the expenditure of another million dollars the first wide ribbon of really flat glass was drawn in a continuous process. proc-ess. When the Libbey-Owens Sheet Glass company, forerunner of the present Libbey-Owens-Ford Glass company, was formed in May, 1916, and purchased patent rights of the Toledo Glass company, Colburn was rewarded for his years of effort by receiving a liberal stock interest in the new company. This enabled him to discharge the many obligations assumed during the earlier years of his work and to provide for his family. In the Colburn flat drawn process, proc-ess, the ingredients of glass sand, ground limestone, soda ash, salt cake and cullet (broken glass) are fed into the furnace and melted at a temperature of about 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit. The molten "metal" passes through a refining chamber and enters a shallow drawing pot. By means of heat applied under un-der and around the edges of the pot, the temperature is maintained at the proper degree for drawing. draw-ing. To start the drawing, the machine is placed in reverse motion, mo-tion, which allows a "bait" a flat iron bar attached to strips of flexible metal to pass over the bending roll, down into the molten mol-ten glass. The glass immediately immediate-ly adheres to the bar, and tht machine is started in forward motion. Wide Ribbon of Glass. Out comes a wide ribbon of glass, pulled by the bait like pulling hot taffy out of a pan with a spatula onto the horizontal horizon-tal flattening table and then to the long annealing oven, or lehr. When the bait reaches the end of the flattening table it is cracked off and removed, allowing the flat glass to continue through the 200-foot 200-foot lehr. The ribbon of flat glass is prevented pre-vented from "pulling to a point" as taffy or sealing wax does when an implement is lifted from the pot by revolving knurled knobs and water-cooling along the edges, of the sheet which maintains a constant width. After it is annealed, the glass is cut to desired sizes, washed, graded and boxed for shipping. The Colburn flat drawn process has made possible higher quality window glass at lower cost, and raised the standard of natural illumination il-lumination for all interiors. It has made double glazing of residences resi-dences economical and practical as a winter fuel-saving method where previously even single windows were virtually luxuries afforded only by the well-to-do. Equally interesting is another phase of the glass industry the history of the newest type automobile auto-mobile windows, dating from a spring evening in Paris in 1903 when Edouard Benedictus, a French chemist, dropped a bottle. When it struck the tile floor, the bottle bounced instead of scattering. scatter-ing. Picking it up, Benedictus found the bottle star-cracked but held together by a celluloid-like enamel which had formed when its contents evaporated. Benedictus later saw a taxicab collision in which a young woman wom-an was cut severely by broken glass. Then he thought of the bottle which did not shatter. He rushed to his laboratory and worked all night preparing the "cheese" for the first "safety sandwich." Two pieces of glass with a plastic filler between were squeezed in an old copy press. He used gelatin on the inner surfaces sur-faces of the glass to hold the "sandwich" together. Benedictus' laminated safety glass was used for airplane air screens, automobile windshields, goggle and gas mask lenses during dur-ing the World war. Crude in performance per-formance and high in cost, it nevertheless nev-ertheless proved the soundness of the laminating principle. After the war ended, there was no demand de-mand for safety glass until closed cars began to replace touring cars and roadsters, in the early twenties. Then Benedictus' discovery dis-covery came to the attention of automobile and flat glass manufacturers. man-ufacturers. Scientists were set' to work to perfect laminated safety glass, because more than half of the injuries in collisions resulted from contact with jagged pieces of glass. Laminated safety glass made its first commercial appearance in the United States in 1924. It cost $10 to $12 a square foot then and was far from being a satisfactory satis-factory product. The filler was nitro-cellulose, which turned brown and cloudy when exposed to sunlight. The filler also loosened loos-ened with aging and weathering. The demand was so great, however, how-ever, that even this imperfect product had become standard equipment for windshields of some makes of automobiles by 1928. Research men still faced the dual task of improving the plastic plas-tic filler and developing thin precision pre-cision plate glass which would allow drivers and passengers an undistorted view from a car. The successor to nitro-cellulose as the safety sandwich "insides" was JP.piiiiM,iJ.L.J..J,JpiiawiJlIUl,lliiMII Wi,I.J ft s, Lung power was used for centuries cen-turies to produce all types of glass. This photograph shows the big cheek development acquired by a glassblower after 30 years following his calling. (From Ew-ing Ew-ing Galloway, N. Y.) cellulose acetate, which did not discolor, but required sealing around the edges of the glass to prevent weather loosening. Cellulose Cel-lulose acetate safety glass was so satisfactory to the public that the presence of the plastic filler was almost forgotten. But scientists foresaw a filler which would be even stronger and more elastic at all temperatures. tempera-tures. In a six-year, six-million dollar research program, chemists chem-ists and glass engineers developed devel-oped a high-test filler called "polyvinyl acetal resin" and precision pre-cision plate glass less than one-eighth one-eighth inch thick. This new product, prod-uct, safer at all temperatures and providing clear vision, will be standard equipment for windshields wind-shields and windows of many 1940 automobile models. The new plastic clings to glass so well that no adhesive is required in assembling assem-bling the sandwich, and no edge sealing is needed because weathering weath-ering does not make polyvinyl deterioriate. Thus Twentieth century motorists get the benefits bene-fits of a climatic phase of research re-search efforts which actually have been going on for 5,000 years. Scientists and historians hve predicted that in the future flur time will be known as the Ag of Glass. Because of its versatility, new forms and uses of glass constantly con-stantly are being developed. And the end is not in sight. |