|
Sand, soda ash, lime and cullet (broken glass) make glass for
bottles. But do not let the simplicity of these ingredients
fool you. There is a lot more to making glass as this booklet tells.
|
|
If you want to make glass, all you have to do is to mix four simple
ingredients together -- Sand, Soda Ash, Lime and Cullet (broken glass),
heat them in a pot until they melt together, and then you have glass.
Nice, glassy glass -- that for any practical purpose would probably be
utterly useless.
With all of your care in weighing and measuring the ingredients, with
all of your precautions to have the heat just right, with all of your
determination to produce a creditable batch of glass, you would of
necessity miss the one all important element which makes all glass
useful and some glass better than other glass. Unless you were trained
over a long period of time in the intricacies of this highly specialized
art, you just could not produce a batch of glass to meet the exacting
standard of today's fabricating processes.
As in so many of the arts, skill in glass making comes only after years
of practical experience and training. With the years comes more than
a mere academic knowledge of the product -- there is born that innate
sense which marks the difference between the workman and the artisan,
and creates instead of a process an art.
Glass manufacture is an art, practiced for nearly 2000 years --
the pride of Rome, the glory of Venice. This booklet outlines briefly
how it is practiced by the century-old firm of Whitall Tatum Co., in
their automatically equipped plants at Millville, New Jersey.
|
