The Making of Glass Bottles.

Manawatu Herald, 15 January 1898, Page 2

The Making of Glass Bottles.

♦ ■ A PICTURESQUE INDUSTRY. (EVENING POST.) " Glasi with care " is not the legend wbioh seems appropriate to the happenings at the New Zealand Glassware Company's works at Newtown on any one of the working days. Glass swirling in a molten, whitehot mas 3, glass stirred as one stirs porridge, glass sticking to iron rods as in oar callow days toffee clasped the spooo, glass blown into like the most brittle soap-bubble, glass * knocked about, glass red-hot fitting itself into moulds, glass in a viscid state smoothed and rounded, glass harder, * yet not solifl^^sejzed and dumped into annealing furnaces— everwhere glass seemingly knocked about in the most haphazard style, emphatically " glass without ca,re." The belated royetering Prohibitioniib of Wellington North, returning in the evening hours from his festive lecture, would aforetime see as he traversed Biddford-Street the flicker and glare of a huge forge close to the Hospital walls. Thaw was little else to be seen but a great squat chimney, round who*e enormous base some tin sheds clustered. This was the concoction of the glass mixture, the cooking of the great' porridge pot, from which on the morrow the - glass-blowers would ■haps their gloss of bottle?. Bu^ all that is changed now. The growth of the industry has led to the erection of more ebeds and buildings, and the factory has now quite shut in that picturesque flicker of the grates and the shooting of (he flames. Probably the average housewife, as she buys her jar for jam or for preserved fruit, and the average man as he imbibes his soda-water and liimj'.iiee, has not the slightest idea of the method of miking the jam jar or the soda-water bottle. Yet that process is most interesting. Some white sand (imported from Sydney, as at present the best quality of sand is not obtainable in quantity in Afaoriland), some time, broken glass, and other ingredients are mixed at night-time in the big > Btone»lined tank which is built in the base of %he big chimney ; the furnaces are charged and the flames roar over the mass, slowly melting it, until in the morning it is glass, white and molten. The theqtlo their share of the work -and a hoi share it is. Into the tank of liquid ghtts one dips a hollow iron rod and takes up a blob of viscid glass. The rod 'is rapidly twirled to prevent ttie glass, which has now become red hot, from falling off, and it is blo#n into to give it shape, and. further rounded on a marble slab. It, is next handed over to another boy, wsho lowers the masß into a mould, and &en blows into the glass till it fills «it to the required shape. The mould is quickly opened and the bottle, as it now is, is broken from the rod and handed to the finisher, who mends the broken mouth by putting upon it a smooth ring oLeooling glass. The bottle is then whisked off to the annealing kilns, where for four day9 it reposes, the kilns being kept during that period at an even temperature. After cooling, the bottle emerges, tough and complete. The process is the same for alt kinds of bottles, different moulds, of course, givtog^ the bottles their characteristic shape. The scene at the various squads— for on both eides of the tank of glass the work is going on— is picturesque and hot— chiefly hot. Weiesman .or Lombroso, too, might with effect study whether the well- developed cheek of the glass-blowers is a result of their peculiar labours or cf that "cheek" which all colonials are said Par excellence to possess. (To be continued.)