A Glass Furnace Without Crucibles, Brookfield installing tank

A GLASS FURNACE WITHOUT CRUCIBLES.

AFTER many years of the use in glass works of crucibles in the preparing of glass for the pipes of the blower, a German named Ferrari has found a way of doing without them by the use of a new furnace, which now reaches its highest exposition at the Bushwick Glass Works of William Brookfield, situated on Grand street, Brooklyn. There every day, Sundays of course, excepted, a lot of glass blowers may be seen exemplifying the new system, which is, or may become, a revolutionizer in glass blowing. It is a simple method, and one which it would seem ought to have presented itself to glass blowers or glass bottle makers years ago. Given a certain mixture of sand, soda ash, and lime, and the glass blower is happy, but the glass maker is not necessarily so. He wants to reduce the cost of production as well as increase the normal value of the material. So in Mr. Brookfield's establishment, where have been made three-fourths of the telegraph insulators used in this country, they are now trying the new system. Under the old fashioned method a crucible of molder's clay capable of holding a ton of glass mixture was made. The crucible itself was heated for thirty-six or forty-eight hours, carried on an iron frame called a "goat" to a furnace, in which, heated to about 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit, the glass material was dumped. There the crucible and its contents sizzled and boiled until the following morning, when the blowers stuck their long, polished blowing tubes into the white hot mass, and from that drew the material from which they blew bottles. So soon as the mass in the glass blowers crucible was exhausted so soon he had finished his work.

Under the new method a man may blow glass from one year's end to another if he possesses the wind and energy. The supply of material is inexhaustible. Crucibles are abolished. The mixture necessary for common green glass is dumped into a great tank, which takes the place of the five, six, or eight crucibles in the old fashioned furnace. When the mixture has reached the necessary liquid condition, and is molten glass, it runs through a small flue into another compartment, and into this the workman sticks the end of his tube and picks up a quantity of material of which to blow a bottle. There are no crucibles to annoy him or cheat him out of a day's work, as the breaking of one may do at any time, and meanwhile fresh glass mixture is being heated into molten glass at the other end of the furnace.