the finest quality, any more than a farmer than can grow wheat to
the exclusion of every other produce; and whoever makes that attempt,
will, in the end, find out his error. A ten-pot furnace, filling nine
pots weekly, besides overtakers occasionally, (the tenth being an empty
pot for the castor-hole workman,) may employ five chairs of workmen,
changing alternately every six hours, day and night; there being five
chairs at work, and five chairs at rest.
The four-chair system is, however, the mode
usually adopted—viz., the first is termed the
castor-hole chair, consisting of workman,
servitor, footmaker, and boy, for making large goods, such as carboys,
and large show-rounds for the chemists' windows, milk pans, handled quart
and pint jugs, decanters, semicircles, for roughened lamp shades, &c.
Tall or muscular men are employed in this department; as occasionally,
goods of thirty or forty pounds weight of Glass will require great power
to work into form, the leverage of the blowing iron giving additional
weight to the article under manufacture. An empty pot, heated with dried
beech-wood, is used by the workman at the castor-hole for re-heating
the Glass.
The second chair consists of a workman,
servitor, footmaker, and boy, for making fancy articles, and goods
required for cutting—viz., toilet and smelling bottles; also
tube-drawing in all its operations, for barometer, thermometer, and
steam gauges, as well as chemical apparatus of small size, &c.
The Glass for these purposes is re-heated at the mouth of one of the
pots containing fluid Glass.
The third chair, consisting of workman,
servitor, footmaker, and boy—is almost entirely occupied in
making
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