The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864

Him Miselle assailed with questions, and learned that the trough contained

"Cullet" is the waste of the glass-room. The superfluous material taken up on the pontil, and the shards of articles broken in process of manufacture. The ingenious reader will thus interpret the heading of this paper.

This was to be a fine quality of flint-glass, and to it might be added coloring-matter of any desired tint; but in the choice and proportion of this lay one of the principal secrets of the art.

All this information did the civil compounder vouchsafe to Miselle, with the indulgent air of one who humors a child by answering his questions, although quite sure that the subject is far above his comprehension; and he smiled in much amusement at seeing his answers jotted down upon her tablets. So Miselle thanked him, smiling a little in her turn, and they parted in mutual satisfaction.

"These trucks you see are ready-loaded with the frit, or glass-material, and are to be wheeled down to the furnaces presently," said Cicerone. "But, before following them, we had better go down and see the fires."

Descending a short flight of stone steps, the party now entered a long, dark passage, through which a torrent of wind swept, driving before it the ashes and glowing cinders that dropped continually from a circular grating overhead. The ground beneath was strewn with fire, and the whole arrangement offered a rare opportunity to any misanthrope whose preferences might point to death in the shape of a fiery shower-bath.

In a gloomy crypt, opening near the grating, stood a gnome whose duty it was to feed the furnace overhead with soft coal, which must be thrown in at a small door and then pushed up and forward until it lay upon the grating where it was consumed. Around this central fire the glass-pots, ten to each furnace, are arranged, their lower surfaces in actual contact with it, while the domed roof reverberates the heat upon them from above.

All around stood sturdy piers of brick and iron, and low-browed arches, crushed, one could not but fancy, out of their original proportions by the immense weight they were forced to uphold.

Returning to the Inferno, Cicerone led the way to a pot which was being filled with frit from one of the little covered cars that he had pointed out in the mixing-room. This process was to be effected gradually, as he explained,—a certain portion being at first placed in the heated pot, and suffered to melt, and then another, until the pot should be full, when the door of it would be put up and closed with cement.

"And how long before the frit will be entirely melted?" asked Monsieur.

"From thirty-six to sixty hours. The time varies a good deal with the seasons, and different sorts of glass take different times to melt. This flint-glass melts the easiest, and common bottle-glass takes the longest. Crown-glass, such as is used for window-panes, comes between the two; but that is not made here."

"And when the glass is sufficiently boiled, what next?"

"You shall see, for here is a pot just opened, and this man with the long iron rod, called a pontil, or punty, in his hand, is about to skim it."

"What is there to skim off?"

"Oh, there will be impurities, of course, however carefully the ingredients are prepared. Some of these sink to the bottom, and some rise in scum, or, as it is called here, glass-gall, and sometimes sandiver."

"Just like broth or society, isn't it, Optima?" suggested Miselle, aside.

"Why don't you discover a social pontil, then?"

"Oh, I have no taste for reforming. What would there be to laugh at in the world, if the human sandiver were removed?"

"It might be an improvement to have the gall removed, my dear," remarked Optima, significantly; but Miselle was too busy in watching the skimming to understand the gentle rebuke.

Thrusting the pontil far into the pot, the workman moved it gently from side to side, turning it at the same time, until he suddenly withdrew upon its point a large lump of glowing substance, which he shook off upon a smooth iron table standing near, called a marver, (that is, marbre,) in size and shape not unlike the largest of a nest of teapoys. Here the lump of sandiver lay, while through its mass shot rays of vivid prismatic color, glowing and dying along its surface so vivaciously that one needs must fancy the salamander no fable, and that this death of gorgeous agony was something more than the mere cooling of an inert mass of matter.

"You see how bubbly and streaked that is now?" broke in the voice of Cicerone upon Miselle's little dream. "But after standing awhile the air will all escape from the pot, leaving the glass smoother, thicker, and tougher than it is now. Don't you want to look in, before it cools off?"

With a mental protest against the fate of those luckless individuals who threw Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego into the seven-times heated furnace, Miselle stooped, and, looking in, uttered a cry of surprise and delight.

It was the very soul of fire, the essence of light and heat. Above, rose a glowing arch, quivering with an intensity of color, such as fascinates the eye of the eagle to the noonday sun. Below, undulated in great oily waves a sea of molten matter, throbbing in vivid curves against the sides of its glowing basin. And arch and wall and heaving waves all mingled in a pure harmony, an accord, of light too intense for color, or rather a color so intense as to be nameless in this pale world.

Miselle knew now how the moth feels who plunges wildly into the flame that lures him to his death, and yet fascinates him beyond the power of resistance. The door was very small, or it might have been already too late, when Optima touched the shoulder of this modern Parsee, and suggested, calmly,—

"If you burn your eyes out here, my dear Miselle, you will be unable to see anything else."

The thought was a kind and sensible one, as, coming from Optima, it could not have failed of being; and Miselle stood upright, stared forlornly about her, and found the world very pale and weak, very cold and dark.

Was it to solace her sudden exile from fairy-land, or was it only as a customary courtesy, that an old man, wasted and paled by years of ministration at this fiery shrine, now seized a long, hollow iron rod, called a blow-stick, and, thrusting the smaller end into the pot, withdrew a small portion of the glass, and, while retaining it by a swift twirl, presented the mouth-piece of the tube to Miselle with a gesture so expressive that she immediately applied her lips to those of the blow-stick, and rounded her cheeks to the similitude of those corpulent little Breezes whom the old masters are so fond of depicting attendant upon the flight of their brothers the Winds?

Ah, my little dears, with your straws and soap-suds you will never blow a bubble like that! As it slowly rounded to its perfect sphere, what secrets of its birth within that glowing furnace, what mysteries of the pure element whose creation it seemed, flashed in fiery hieroglyph athwart its surface! A mocking globe, whereon were painted realms that may none the less exist, because man's feeble vision has never seen them, his fettered mind never imagined them. Who knows? It may have been the surface of the sun that was for one instant drawn upon that ball of liquid fire. Who is to limit the affinities, the subtle reproductions of Nature's grand ideas?

But as the wonder culminated, as the glancing rays resolved themselves into more positive lines, as the enigma seemed about to offer its own solution, the bubble broke, flew into a myriad tiny shards, which, with a tinkling laugh, fell to the grimy pavement, and lay there sparkling malicious fun into Miselle's eyes.

Cicerone stooped and gathered some of the fragments. Surely, never was substance so closely allied to shadow. The lightest touch, a breath even, and they were gone,—and were they caught, it was like the capture of one of the floating films of a summer morning, glancing brightly to the eye, but impalpable to the touch.

When all had looked, the guide slowly closed his hand with a cruel gripe, and, opening it, threw down a little shower of scintillating dust, an airy fall of powdered diamonds, lost as they readied the earth, and that was all.

"We're casting some of those Fresnel lanterns to-day. Perhaps the ladies would like to see them," suggested the pale little old man, and pointed to a powerful machine with a long lever-handle at the top, which, being thrown up, showed a heavy iron mould, heated quite hot, and just now smoking furiously from a fresh application of kerosene-oil, with which the mould is coated before each period of service, much as the housewife butters her griddle before each plateful of buckwheat cakes.

As the smoke subsided, the old man, who proved a very intelligent as well as civil person, thrust his pontil into the pot nearest the press, and, withdrawing a sufficient quantity of the glass, dropped it squarely into the open mould, whose operator, immediately seizing the long handle, swung himself from it in a grotesque effort to increase the natural gravity of his body, and succeeded in bringing it down with great force. Then, leaning over the lever in a state of complacent exhaustion, he glared for a moment at the spectators with the calm superiority of one who, having climbed to the summit of knowledge, can afford to pity the ignorant crowd groping below.

The mould being reopened presently displayed a large, heavy lantern, whose curiously elaborate flutings and pencillings were, as the intelligent artisan averred, arranged upon the principle of the famous Fresnel light, whose introduction some years ago marked an epoch in the history of light-houses.

"Why, Miss, these little up-and-down marks, that you'd take it were just put in for fancy," said William Greaves, "have got a patent on 'em, and no one else could put 'em into a lantern without being prosecuted."

"But why? What difference do they make?"

"Why, Miss, every one of them fingerings makes a lens; you see it's just the same inside as out, and it sort of spreads the light. That a'n't the way to call it, but that's the idea; for the man that got it up was down here, and I talked with him."

"And what are they for?"

"For ships' lanterns, Ma'am. They take this round lantern, when it's all done here, and split it in two halves up and down, and then put one on each side a vessel's bows just like the lamps on a doctor's gig, and the bowsprit runs out between just like the horse does in the gig."

At this juncture a small boy rushed up, and, thrusting a stick into the still red-hot lantern, dexterously tilted it up and carried it away to a furnace of different construction from the first, into one of whose open doors he thrust it, and then returned to wait for another.

This furnace, called a flashing-furnace, was round like the first, and was fitted with eight or ten doors, from all of which the flames rushed eagerly, and in a very startling fashion.

"This is fed constantly with coal-oil," expounded Cicerone. "It is brought in pipes, as you see, and drips down inside. These doors are called 'glory-holes'"–

"Aureoles, perhaps," suggested Optima, in a whisper.

"And the lanterns, or whatever is in hand, are brought here after pressing, and put in to get well heated through again before they are given to the finisher. Fire-polishing they call it. Here you see one just ready to be taken out."

"He will drop it," cried Miselle, as another boy, wielding a pontil with a lump of melted glass at the end, darted before her, and, pressing this heated end against the bottom of the lantern, picked it up and carried it away, over his shoulder, as if he were a stray member of some torch-light procession.

"Not he! He's too well used to his trade," laughed Monsieur. "Now come and see the finishing process."

Following the steps of the young wide-awake, Miselle saw him deliver the pontil, with the lantern still attached, to a listless individual seated upon a bench whose long iron arms projected far in front of him, while an idle pontil lay across them. This the boy snatched up and departed, while the man, suddenly rousing himself, began to roll the new pontil up and down the arms of his bench with his left hand, while with a pair of compasses in his right he carefully gauged the diameter of the revolving lantern, and then smoothed away its rough-cast edges by means of a blackened bit of wood, somewhat of the shape, and bearing the name, of a battledoor.

The finishing over, another stick was thrust inside the lantern, and it was separated from the pontil by the application of a bit of cold iron. It was then carried to the mouth of a long gallery-like oven, moderately heated, and fitted with a movable floor, upon which the articles put in at the hot end were slowly transported through a carefully graduated atmosphere to the cool end at a distance of perhaps a hundred feet, and on their arrival were ready to be packed for transportation.

This process was called annealing, and the oven with a movable floor was technically denominated a leer.

"Here they are pressing tumblers," continued the guide, pointing to a press of smaller size and power, standing near another door of the same furnace. "They have just had a large order from California, from a single firm, for—how many tumblers did you tell me, Mr. Greaves?"