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six feet long
and fifteen inches in diameter—a cylinder whose polished crystal
walls are uniformly thin in every part to the minutest fraction of an
inch; so that when this cylinder is split and flattened it will be a
mammoth plate of "blown" glass, measuring forty-five by seventy-six
or eighty inches. The blower at work challenges admiration, as his
tremendous lungs force air into the growing bubble at the end of his
pipe. Its cooling walls grow thinner, and yet the swelling air-cell
within is never permitted
to burst its fragile prison.
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As the mass takes
on a cylindrical shape, the man calls to his aid the force of gravity,
and the pipe becomes a pendulum, with the growing cylinder for a "bob."
And so, by skillful twirling, constant blowing, and laborious but graceful
swinging, the perfect cylinder appears, while the gazer is puzzled which
to most admire, cause or effect, workman or work. The finished cylinder
is now split from end to end by the touch of a red-hot bar, and with
others is borne to a queer furnace, whose interior
is fitted with a revolting floor like a railway "turn-table."
On this are laid the cylinders, and slowly they are borne through
positive and comparative to superlative degrees of heat. The fracture
being uppermost, the softening cylinder of its own weight parts along
the upper side. A workman, with a bit of soft wood on the end of a
rod, then operates on the demoralized cylinder as a laundress would
work in ironing a big cuff. The block, pushed over the uneven surface,
flattens the cylinder upon its stone bed, where it lies, prone and pretty,
like a huge sheet of clear gelatine. A turn of the furnace floor, and
another cylinder comes within reach of workman and flattener, while the
same movement carries the finished sheet to a cooler place, eventually
to find its way to the cutter, the packer, and the distant sash of the
"consumer."
In the converting of molten glass
into table-ware, "bar-ware," bottles, lamps, chimneys, and a thousand
other objects, improved machinery is springing unto existence, each
device greeted with more or less disfavor by the workmen. But as yet
no inventor has succeeded in displacing the big-armed, deep-chested
"blower." He defies machinery, lives to a good old age, and surely
earns his twenty-five and fifty dollars per week. The latter figure
is attained by the few men who can "blow" a sheet of the dimensions
already given.
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