Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/322

308 wall tiles which, were made previous to 1870. They are plain tiles of yellow clay, of great hardness, the glaze being also hard and entirely free from "crazing," and fully equal to anything of the kind which has since been produced. The hexagonal specimen figured is decorated with painted designs above the glaze, consisting of a green vine on a buff ground, with a red center outlined in black. The lozenge-shaped example is painted with a black device on a lemon ground. Later, several patterns of embossed unglazed mantel tiles, in conventional decoration, were produced, but the manufacture of ornamental tiles was only carried on a short time. At present they make plain geometrical floor tiles of different colored bodies and of exceeding hardness. The clay used is fine and homogeneous, and when burned almost approaches stone-ware. The firm also manufactures fire-brick, dental muffles, and stove-linings.

Furnace tests of the standing-up power of the best-known fire-bricks, instituted by the Second Geological Survey of Pennsylvania in 1876, at Harrisburg, showed that the productions of Messrs. Hyzer & Lewellen were superior, in heat-resisting qualities, to all others that were submitted for examination.

Scarcely two years after the Centennial, Mr. John G. Low, of Chelsea, Mass., who had finished a course of several years in the art schools of Paris, and had recently become interested in the manufacture of pottery, formed a copartnership with his father, Hon. John Low, and immediately commenced the erection of a tile-factory in his native place. Less than a year and a half after the works were started we find the firm competing with English tile-makers at the exhibition at Crewe, near Stoke-on-Trent, which was conducted under the auspices of the Royal Manchester, Liverpool, and North Lancashire Agricultural Society, one of the oldest societies in England. There they won the gold medal, over all the manufacturers of the United Kingdom, for the best collection of art tiles exhibited. This record, probably unsurpassed in ceramic history, serves to illustrate the remarkably rapid development of an industry new in America, but old in the East, and shows the resources at command of the American potter.

In 1883 Hon. John Low retired from the firm, and Mr. John F. Low, son of the founder, became associated with his father, under the style of J. G. & J. F. Low.

Mr. Arthur Osborne, who has designed the majority of the tiles produced here, is a talented artist of the older schools of art, whose conceptions are chaste and classic and possess marked originality.

A novel method was resorted to by Mr. Low in the embellishment of his earlier productions, which he has patented, and which be calls the "natural" process. To secure accurate impressions