By Abraham Freeman-Moore
November 23, 2024
The door did not budge. I looked to the right and saw a black plastic box. I assumed this must be the card reader. When I looked back through the glass door, my wife had come over. She pushed the door open enough to disengage the lock. I seized my chance and pulled the door the rest of the way open, slipping inside.
The shop was covered in glass art pieces of different hues and shapes. At the front desk, I was handed a waiver, which I honestly looked over briefly and signed. I was told that if I got hurt, I was not allowed to sue. That sounds about right, I thought.
As I placed the signed waiver back on the desk, we were directed to look at a shelf on the right that housed multiple glass pieces of art. The highest shelf housed tier-one art pieces, which included a paperweight and a pumpkin the size of a plum. As I looked down the shelf I saw that the tiers increased, as did the prices. Tier one came in at around one hundred dollars. I will let you extrapolate that out to the higher tiers.
This, was to be our first glass-blowing session. My wife and I had been struggling to make friends that were couples. As luck would have it, she had hit it off with one of her coworkers who had a husband that wanted to hang out as well. Thus, our first friend couple was born. The outing had been arranged for our second group activity as we got to know each other better.
On the opposite wall, we collected glass shards that had been packaged into miniature ziplock bags. I had chosen to make a paperweight. Picking out the colors cobalt blue, gray, and sunshine yellow, I took shards and spilled them onto the silver platter that had been provided. My idea was that the dark blue and bright yellow would complement each other, almost like the dark spots on our sun.
We were instructed to grab our personal protective equipment, leather gloves, and safety glasses. Filing into the hot shop the temperature change was pleasant from the fall weather.
Inside the shop, a man in his late twenties introduced himself as Dough.
Dough explained that each of us would take a turn with him creating our selected art piece.
“So, who wants to go first?” He said.
The other three said not I, so I said.
“I’ll go.”
I informed him that I had chosen a paperweight. He grabbed a four-foot metal pipe. Moving to the furnace, he dipped it in. He explained that the it was about 2,100 degrees. At the bottom of it sat a liquid glob of clear glass. The furnace was custom built, powered by electric coils like the coils in an electric oven. Dough informed me that the furnace is never shut off because it takes days to get the temperature back up.
Think about that electric bill. Jeez, I thought.
Glass seems to be so primal, though on another hand, it is new to humanity. It is created when lightning strikes sand which is called fulgurite or by volcanoes when they pop out obsidian (Rakov). Algae have even been found to discard glass as a waste product (Berard). The point is that glass has been around in natural forms for a long time. Humans started creating it about 5000 years ago. To put that into perspective Homosapiens have existed for about 300,000 years (What Does).
When I have the option of using a glass cup or a plastic one, I will always choose the glass one. Glass in my mind seems to be the safer option, though it was not always this way. Lead has been found in glass from Mesopotamia (Rehren). To put this into context Mesopotamia existed around “3400-3000” BCE (Mesopotamia).
Are you ready to have your mind blown?
Well, here it is. There is still lead in glass, unfortunately. It depends on what country the glass is made in. The United States of America started placing restrictions on lead amounts in 1973. This was intended to protect children, though adults would benefit through secondary gains. However, the restrictions were not considered safe enough and thus were updated until 2008 (Dignam).
Why do we even need lead in glass anyway? Well, lead imposes a couple of properties on glass that glass makers and the public love. First, it makes glass sparkle. The public seems to love crystal glassware whether it is for jewelry or decanters (Barack).
It’s not actually crystal, it's glass with lead mixed in. Second, when lead is added to glass it lowers the melting temperature, thus making it easier to mold and more cost-effective (What Is). One fascinating way to tell if there is lead in glass is to shine a short wave of ultraviolet light on it. If there is lead present the glass glows a radiant blue (Barack).
In short, there is a cavernous hole that is full of information on glass. I encourage you to critically think and do your own research. One tidbit of information that might be fun to look up is uranium glass.
Dough instructed me to sit on a wooden bench with railings extending off of it by about two feet on either side. Here he brought the pipe with the glob of molten glass that now had shards of the colorful glass stuck to it. As instructed I brought a bowl-shaped spoon made out of cherry wood to the glob and formed it into a globe while I rolled the pipe back and forth. As we repeated this process over and over the paper weight began to take shape. For the finishing touch I stamped the bottom of the paperweight with the letter A and Dough placed the globe into the annealer.
As the three others of the group took their turn with Dough I realized how hot it was in the shop. I was surprised when I saw that the garage door to the hot shop was open. As we wrapped up our creations I thought that we would be able to take them home that day, though this was not the case. They had to cool for twenty-four hours. The wait I found was worth it though.
Getting out to try a new activity with friends was fun. It’s sometimes difficult to brighten gray fall days, though when you are looking into a 2,100-degree furnace it becomes less difficult.
References
Barack, Sarah. “Year of Glass: Old Glass in a New Light: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.” Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, 19 Apr. 2022, www.cooperhewitt.org/2022/04/21/year-of-glass-old-glass-in-a-new-light/.
Berard, Adrian. “A New Glass for the Future: Taking Lionglass out of the Lab and into the Market: Penn State University.” A New Glass for the Future: Taking LionGlass out of the Lab and into the Market | Penn State University, Pennsylvania Sate, 8 Sept. 2023, www.psu.edu/news/research/story/new-glass-future-taking-lionglass-out-lab-and-market.
Dignam, Timothy, et al. “Control of Lead Sources in the United States, 1970-2017: Public Health Progress and Current Challenges to Eliminating Lead Exposure.” Journal of Public Health Management and Practice : JPHMP, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2019, pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6522252/.
Mesopotamia: Civilization Begins, The Getty Museum, www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/mesopotamia/explore.html. Accessed 22 Nov. 2024.
Rakov, Vladimir A. “Lightning Makes Glass.” The Dominick Labino Lecture, University of Florida, Gainesville, 1999, www.rakov.ece.ufl.edu/Gas.html.
Rehren, T. (2014). Glass production and consumption between Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Aegean. Contextualising grave inventories in the Ancient Near East, Qatna Studien Supplementa, 3.
“What Does It Mean to Be Human?” The Smithsonian Institution’s Human Origins Program, 3 Jan. 2024, humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/homo-sapiens#:~:text=The%20species%20that%20you%20and,of%20survival%20in%20unstable%20environments.
“What Is Lead Crystal?” Cumbria Crystal, cumbriacrystal.com/en-us/pages/what-is-lead-crystal. Accessed 23 Nov. 2024.
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