The Drama of Glass Part 1

The Drama of Gla.s.s.

by Kate Field.

The Drama of Gla.s.s was an inspiration born in the brain of Kate Field, as she watched the busy workmen, who with trained eyes and skillful hands, wrought out the products of one of America's great industries that found a temporary home in the World's Fair at Chicago.

It is an addition to the long list of brilliant writings of this versatile woman, whose literary labors have made her memory so dear to the thousands of Americans who have found in them the reflection of her own individuality.

The story of an art that is as old as the building of the City of Babylon, that formed a part in the life of Egypt, that was interwoven in the history of Rome, and that gave a reputation to a nation, is re-told by Miss Field.

From the beginning of the art, wrapped in mystery and legend, step by step her story has become history. She has carried it as far as the World's Fair, and it has devolved upon Mr. Thos. M. Willey to complete what she so well begun.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

PROLOGUE

Have you ever thought what a drama gla.s.s plays in the history of the world? It is a drama even in the French acceptation of the word, which infers not only intense action, but death. Can there be more intense action than that of fire, and is not gla.s.s the own child of fire and death?

The origin of gla.s.s is lost in myth and romance. n.o.body knows how it was born, but there are as many traditions as there are cities claiming to be Homer's birthplace. Pliny says that the discovery of gla.s.s was due to subst.i.tuting cakes of nitre for stones as supports for cooking pots.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

According to his story, certain Phoenician merchants landed on the coast of Palestine and cooked their food in pots supported on cakes of nitre taken from their cargo.

Great was the wonder of these Phoenicians--the Yankees of antiquity, the builders of Tyre and Sidon, the inventors of the alphabet--on beholding solid matter changed to a strange fluid, which voluntarily mingled with its nearest neighbor, the sand, and made a transparent material now called gla.s.s.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

This story is too pretty to spoil, and those of us who prefer romance to science will believe it, though Menet the chemist positively declares that to produce such a fluid would require a heat from 1800 to 2700 degrees Fahrenheit. Under the circ.u.mstances narrated by Pliny, such a tremendously high temperature was impossible. Science often interferes with romance, and were not truth better even than poetry, science would be a nuisance in literature.

An art that Hermes taught to Egyptian chemists like good wine needs no bush, yet on its brilliant crest may be found the splendid quarterings not only of Egypt, but of Gaul, Rome, Byzantium, Venice, Germany, Bohemia, Great Britain, and last but not least the United States.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

He was a poor man, who, in Seneca's day, had not his house decorated with various designs in gla.s.s; while Scaurus, the Aedile, a superintendent of public buildings in ancient Rome, actually built a theatre seating forty thousand persons, the second story of which was made of gla.s.s. That masterpiece of ancient manufacture, the Portland Vase, was taken from the tomb of the Roman Emperor Alexander Severus, and should bear his name rather than that of the d.u.c.h.ess of Portland, who purchased it from the Barberini family after it had stood three hundred years in their famous Roman gallery.

In the thirteenth century Venice reigned supreme in gla.s.s making. No one knows how long the City of Doges might have monopolized certain features of this art but for a woman who could not keep a secret from her lover.

Marietta was the daughter of Beroviero, one of the most famous gla.s.s makers of the fifteenth century. Many were his receipts for producing colored gla.s.s, and as he had faith in his own flesh and blood he confided these precious receipts to his daughter. Alas, for poor Beroviero! Marietta, after the manner of women, loved a man, one Giorgio, an artisan in her father's employ. History does not tell, but I have no doubt that Giorgio wheedled the secret out of his sweetheart.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Once possessed of these receipts he published and sold them for a large sum, then turning on the man he had betrayed he demanded faithless Marietta in marriage. Thus it came to pa.s.s that the ign.o.ble love of a weak woman for a dishonorable man helped to change the fortunes of Venice. The world gained by the destruction of a monopoly, one more proof of the poet's dictum that "all partial evil is universal good."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

It was in the middle of this same fifteenth century that a number of Venetian gla.s.s makers were imprisoned in London because they could not pay the heavy fine imposed by the Venetian Council for plying their art in foreign lands. "Let us work out our fine," pleaded these victims of prohibition. Their prayer was warmly seconded by England's king, whose intercession was by no means disinterested. Yielding to royal desire, Venice freed these artisans, and thus gla.s.s making was established in Great Britain. Beyond the point of reason all prohibitory laws fail sooner or later. Go to the bottom of slang, and as a rule you will find it based on rugged truth. When in the breezy vernacular of this republic a human being is credited with "sand" or is accused of being entirely dest.i.tute of it, he rises to high esteem or falls beneath contempt.

Possessing "sand" he can command success; without it he is a poor creature. For the origin of this slang we turn to gla.s.s making, the excellence of which depends upon sand.

If Bohemia succeeded finally in making clearer and whiter gla.s.s than Venice, it was because Bohemia produced better sand. When the town of Murano furnished the world with gla.s.s, its population was thirty thousand. That number has dwindled to four thousand. Bohemian gla.s.s stood unrivaled until England discovered flint or lead gla.s.s; now, the world looks to the United States for rich cut gla.s.s, the highest artistic expression of modern gla.s.s.

Where does America begin its evolution in gla.s.s? Before the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. In 1608, within a mile of the English settlement of Jamestown, Virginia, a gla.s.s house was built in the woods.

Curiously enough it was the first factory built upon this continent.

This factory began with bottles, and bottles were the first manufactured articles that were exported from North America.

In those early days gla.s.s beads were in great demand. Indians would sell their birthright for a mess of them, so when the first gla.s.s house fell to pieces, a second took its place for the purpose of supplying the Indians with beads.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

A few years later common gla.s.s was made in Ma.s.sachusetts. It appears from the records of the town of Salem that the gla.s.s makers could not have been very successful, as that town loaned them thirty pounds in money which was never paid back.

During the time of the Dutch occupation of Manhattan Island, when New York was known as New Amsterdam, a gla.s.s factory was built near Hanover Square, but not until after the Revolution came and went did gla.s.s making really take root in American soil. In July, 1787, the Ma.s.sachusetts Legislature gave to a Boston gla.s.s company the exclusive right to make gla.s.s in that State for fifteen years. This company prospered and was the first successful gla.s.s manufacturing company in the United States. Then followed others that were successful. As early as 1865 there was manufactured, in the vicinity of Boston, gla.s.s that was the equal of the best flint gla.s.s manufactured in England. Two hundred and fifty years from the time the first rough bottles were exported from Virginia to England seems a long time to us, but how short a time it really is in the life of this ancient art--this drama of gla.s.s.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

FROM 1850 TO 1893

AN EVOLUTION IN GLa.s.s

It is always interesting to trace the history of a great industry. Like the oak, it begins with a small seed that hardly knows its own mind, and is often more surprised than the rest of the world at the result of earnest effort. See what apothecaries did for Italy. Mediaeval art and the Medicis go hand in hand. The drama of gla.s.s in the United States may have as significant a mission, for it is singularly true that James Jackson Jarves, son of Deming Jarves, the pioneer gla.s.s manufacturer of New England, was almost the first American to give his life to the study of old masters and to devote his fortune to collecting their works. The Jarves gallery now belongs to Yale University.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

William L. Libbey was born in Portsmouth, New Hamps.h.i.+re, and became, in 1850, the confidential clerk of Jarves & Commeraiss, the greatest gla.s.s importers of Boston, and whose gla.s.s factory in South Boston was the forerunner of the Libbey Works of the Columbian Exposition. Having made a fortune--the fortune his clever son spent in art and _bric-a-brac_--Deming Jarves sold his gla.s.s factory to his trusted clerk in 1855, and for twenty years this Ma.s.sachusetts industry gained strength and reputation. But the trend of population was westward.

Cheap fuel was necessary to successful gla.s.s making. How could New England coal compete with natural gas? So Ohio came to the front. A few years ago Ohio's natural gas became exhausted. Without a day's disturbance petroleum succeeded gas, and better gla.s.s was made than ever, because oil produces a more even temperature. Verily "there is a soul of goodness in things evil." From Ma.s.sachusetts to Ohio, from coal to gas, from gas to petroleum, what would be the next act in the drama of American gla.s.s? What, indeed, but an act the scene of which was laid in the grounds of the World's Fair!

Believing fully in the westward course of empire, Mr. Edward D. Libbey had the inspiration that if Chicago wanted the World's Fair, Chicago would not only have it, but would create such an exposition as had never been seen. So before even the temporary organization was formed in Chicago the Libbey Gla.s.s Company filed an application for the exclusive right to manufacture gla.s.s at the Columbian Exposition.

The problem of erecting a building that should be architecturally in keeping with the surroundings, that should afford every possible comfort to the thousands of daily visitors and still be used as a manufactory, was not an easy matter.

Begun in October, 1892, the admirable building, put up in the Midway Plaisance to show the process of making gla.s.s, was finished one week before May 1st following. On that bleak opening day thousands of overshoes were stalled in mud a foot deep before the Administration Building, and the owners went home in some cases almost barefooted.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

But there was an expenditure of $125,000 in an idea, and the investors had no reason to fear weather or neglect. From the opening to the closing of the big front door two million people found their way to this gla.s.s house, at which no one threw stones. The trouble was not to get people in, but to keep them out. A mob never benefits itself nor anybody else. To reduce the attendance to reasonable proportions a fee was charged, applicable to the purchase of some souvenir, made perhaps before the buyer's very eyes. Why was this gla.s.s house so popular?

Because its exhibit displayed the only art industry in actual operation within the Fair grounds.

All people like machinery in motion, and the most curious people on earth are Americans. They want to know how things are made, and, like children, are not content until they have laid their hands on whatever confronts them. "Please do not touch" has no terrors for them. In addition to this inborn love of action, there is a fascination about gla.s.s blowing and the fas.h.i.+oning of shapeless matter piping hot from the pot that appeals to men and women of all sorts and conditions. With eyes and mouths wide open, thousands stood daily around the circular factory watching a hundred skilled artisans at work. They looked at the big central furnace, in which sand, oxide of lead, potash, saltpetre and nitrate of soda underwent vitrification; they saw it taken out of the pot a plastic ma.s.s, which, through long, hollow iron tubes, was blown and rolled and twisted and turned into things of beauty. Here was a champagne gla.s.s, there was a flower bowl; now came a decanter, followed by a jewel basket. A few minutes later jugs and goblets and vases galore pa.s.sed from the nimble fingers of the artisans to the annealing oven below.