Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/169

Rh material and ugly. It is not a beautiful or an inspiring thing to blow bottles all day long, unless one does it remarkably well; but the industry remaining, the life in these towns might still be made much less bare than it is, could that gospel of happiness and culture which Mr. Walter Besant and others are preaching in the East End of London find here some good apostle who would make it the burden of a new evangel.

In the larger bottle-works there are generally several melting furnaces, but each is complete in itself, a unit from which a larger or smaller plant may be constructed, according to the requirements of the case. Each furnace is lodged in its own building. A certain symmetry is loaned to these low, rectangular wooden structures by the tall brick furnace-shaft which rises through the center of the roof, and by the numerous smaller chimneys scattered around the edge. The sides of the building are movable on pivots, and when open give the factory somewhat the appearance of the Japanese houses pictured by Mr. Morse.

Inside of the factory all is life and movement. But, amid the dirt and confusion which characterize such an interior, there are the order of active money-getting and the beauty of a long-practiced dexterity.

If one follow the crude materials from the time they enter the building until they finally emerge in the form of many-shaped bottles, he will begin his inspection at the mixing-room, where the questions of content and proportion are decided. Large wooden wheelbarrows come and go, stopping long enough only to have their weight taken, and to dump their thoroughly ground contents into one of the bins on the side of the room. Patient old men, with hoe and shovel, mechanically mix together the stuff for the "batch" This varies in its composition according to the sort of bottles that are to be made. Three grades of bottle glass are recognized. The ordinary green glass is obtained from a mixture of about thirty-eight parts of soda and twenty parts of marble-dust to every hundred parts of sand. The glass is essentially a lime-soda glass, not dissimilar to window glass in its composition. The sand used comes from the neighborhood, and contains a little iron. As no bleaching agents are employed, this gives the glass its characteristic light green color—the bottle-green of our colorists. The second grade, the amber glass, has about the same composition, only it is colored by the addition of a little ground coke, black-lead, or some other form of carbon, about eight ounces to every hundred pounds of sand. This makes a much less innocent-looking bottle than the sea-green tint of the first glass. The finest grade, the so-called flint glass, contains about the same ingredients as the ordinary bottle glass, but the materials used are purer, and some such bleaching agent as manganese dioxide,