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A Piece of Glass
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A Piece of Glass (Harper's Great American Industries) - Page 251

 
the mass in the fiery pot until the last glass completely overlaps the earlier lump. Now he takes the great glaring ball to an iron mould, and with a few dexterous turns fashions it into a pear shape. When this is done the gatherer's duty is ended, and he hands the pipe and glass over to the blower.
    The French and Belgian blowing furnaces are combined with the melting furnace, but in England and America they are separate, being constructed with a series of openings through which the blower may insert his material into an intensely hot chamber. The gas supplying the heat is burned directly under the blow-holes, being mixed with air from fire-clay shafts surrounding the burners on the plan of the Bunsen burner. Slabs of fire-brick distribute the massive heat into hundreds of small jets, which cannot touch the glass.
    The blower's skill is the most marvelous part of the fascinating series of transformations witnessed in the glass-house, conjuring the glaring globe (a gigantic dragon's eye) by artful whispers into a sheet of solid transparency. He takes the pipe from the gatherer, with the great pear-shaped mass still resting in the mould, and blows a huge bubble of air into it. Then, alternately blowing and manipulating, he enlarges the bubble and shapes the mass into the form of a great decanter with a short neck and very thick bottom. The thinnest part of the glass next the pipe quickly hardens into the fixed foundation from which the soft hot
Window-Glass Blowing--A Good Beginning
WINDOW-GLASS BLOWING--A GOOD BEGINNING.

remainder is to grow into a cylinder of the same diameter. In front of each blow-hole is a long narrow platform at right angles to the furnace, spanning a deep pit. This is a blower's post. Standing there, he swings the swelling bulb into the abyss, like an enormous hollow pendulum carved from flame, coaxing it to expand with frequent timely blowings.
Window-Glass Blowing--Nearly Done
WINDOW-GLASS BLOWING--NEARLY DONE.