The Neighbors

 

"Portrait of Giambologna"by Hendrick Goltzius

In Florence, directly across the street from the Palazzo Neri, where glassmaker Antonio Neri spent his youth (now the Marzichi-Lenzi), was the residence and workshop of famed sculptor Giambologna. This two-building compound was a 'gift' to the artist from the newly crowned Grand Duke Ferdinando de' Medici, in 1587. It was intended to settle debts incurred for the artist's work by the previous grand duke, Francesco. The dwelling, at 26 Borgo Pinti, was located on the same street that was formerly inhabited by the likes of Michelangelo, Perugino, Pontormo and Cellini.
Neri's father, the royal physician, had collected art. According to historian Giovanni Cinelli, in 1677, when Antonio Neri's nephew owned the property, among the pieces in the house were:

Two small bronze horses by Giambologna, many works of [Simone] Pignoni and others, among which are two marvelous holdings; a waist-up Ecce Homo by Titian and a Satyr of beautiful ancient bronze which is wonderfully captivating; it is of the Greek manner and expresses an attitude of prompt movement that recalls liveliness, the muscles are very well prepared. Finally, a statue of Cupid flanked in marble in the best Greek style.

Giambologna had a strong influence on Florentine art and his work was to be found throughout the city, from the courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio, to the gardens of the Casino di San Marco, where Neri made glass. The sculptor was well known for the fine surface finishes he achieved on marble and for his ability to resolve the technical challenges of portraying multiple figures, especially those involving a complex intertwining of limbs and bodies. The Rape of the Sabine Women, completed when Neri was a boy, is considered his crowning achievement.

Giambologna was born in Douai, Flanders, now in France, as Jean Boulogne. He landed in Florence in 1553, after a period working in Rome for Pope Pius IV among others. The Medici never allowed him to leave Tuscany for fear that once out of their reach, he would be enticed to go to work for another of the European sovereigns, never to return. It is reasonable to speculate that before his own trip to Flanders in 1604, Antonio Neri offered to relay messages or other effects to the family of his seventy-five year old former neighbor. Neri spent seven years with his friend Emmanuel Ximenes in Antwerp. Before his return to Tuscany, in 1611, both Grand Duke Ferdinando and Giambologna had already gone to meet their maker.

Neri had left Florence in his twenties, and returned in his thirties to a very different city. He settled down to write the book for which he will forever be remembered, L'Arte Vetraria, the first printed book devoted to the formulation of glass.

This post first appeared here on 20 Sept. 2013.

Witches Brew of Glass

 

Glass pumpkin evocative of chalcedony glass

Courtesy of  Smithsonian Museum store.

In honor of Halloween, we will take a detailed look at chalcedony glass; this is one of, if not the most colorful types of glass ever made. In the seventeenth century, it was extremely dangerous for glassmakers and artists, containing a veritable “witch’s brew” of toxic materials. In his 1612 book, L’Arte Vetraria, glassmaker Antonio Neri presents three recipes of which he is clearly very proud. Each of the three is attended by a complex list of ingredients. He describes the end result this way:

It will be adorned with so many graceful and beautiful areas of undulations, and enhanced with the play of diverse, lively, flaming colors, that truly it will seem nature cannot attain so great a height or grand a prize. [1]

In the same passage, Neri explains the importance of purifying each ingredient and eliminating all contamination. In so doing, he provides a fascinating insight into the thinking of an alchemist. He writes:

There is no doubt that in this art, when the ingredients are well prepared, they permeate the glass with dazzling lively colors. Impurities will ordinarily impede the entry of the tinctures into the glass, and prevent their intimate unification. However, when you open the colors of the metals well, and separate them from their impurities and sediment, their beauty will always by far surpass those that are common and ordinarily made in the furnace. [2]

To Neri’s mind, the metals used as pigments must undergo a process of “opening.” Once this was done, each metal’s characteristic color or “tincture” was free to permeate the glass, provided it was free of impurities. Today we might say that by reducing each metal into an extremely fine powder, the individual atoms more easily disperse in the glass. Neri’s “opening” process usually involved dissolving a pure metal in an acid and then slowly evaporating the liquid, resulting in a fine powder. Most color arises because, once in the glass,  the metal atoms block some parts of the spectrum, but not others. The result is that each metal gives rise to its own hue and only because it is dispersed in the oxygen rich environment of the glass matrix. 

 The striking point here is how the alchemist’s model was a perfectly adequate description for the times, in the same way that the atomic model works for us. Unfortunately, there was less awareness of the negative health consequences in some of these preparations. The evaporation of powerful acids could (and can) certainly cause acute respiratory and tissue irritation. However there were far more insidious dangers lurking in Neri’s chalcedony recipes.

Ribbed vessel, chalcedony glass, 17th century, 

 Museo del Monastero di Santa Giulia, Brescia.

In his first prescription, he dissolves silver, mercury, cobalt, manganese, copper and iron. [3] Some of these have been prepared with sulfur which also ends up in the mix. He evaporates it to a powder and adds it to well seasoned, good quality clear glass along with pulverized chimney soot. He notes “When you stir [the molten glass] thoroughly it gives off a definite blue smoke.” Specifically hazardous in this recipe is the formation of mercury fumes, which are extremely toxic to breathe. 

He advises that in the furnace the glass appears “as red as fire,” but that “master craftsman always pinches off the glass for the job with nippers, and reheats it, in order to make waves, undulations and interplays of the most beautiful colors.” The reheating process is known to modern glassmakers as “striking,” a maneuver that brings out surprising color in some glass formulations. He suggests that this chalcedony can be used to form drinking glasses to more shapely cups, saltshakers, flower vases and similar vessels.

In his second and more sophisticated preparation Neri dissolves the materials in groups, in six separate flasks, only then combining them. He also adds new materials: lead, zinc, “blue painters enamel,” antimony and red varnish. The final recipe for chalcedony introduces new purification procedures and increases the number of separate flasks to nine. Additional ingredients include metal sulfides, ultramarine, tin, arsenic (read: death's calling card) and crimson paint. 

It is tempting to dismiss a few of these ingredients, like red varnish, or pulverized chimney soot; organic materials that would readily decompose in the heat of the furnace. However, Neri is known to have been a careful experimenter and these additions may well have had an effect on the melt, even if not in terms of color. Of the third recipe, which Neri developed in Antwerp, he wrote: 

Many Portuguese gentlemen in the practice of appraising jewels said that nature could do no better. This was the most beautiful chalcedony that I have ever made in my life. While it may be quite laborious and take a long time to produce, the result is fit for a king. I presented His Excellency, the Prince of Orange, with two vessels of this chalcedony, which delighted him greatly. [4]

[1] Neri 1612, p. 34.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Manganese and cobalt were unknown as distinct metals, but were used in their oxide forms, mined as minerals.
[4] Neri 1612, p. 48. The prince of orange was Philip William.
* This post first appeared here on 31 Oct 2014.

A Salamander in the Furnace

 

From Michael Maier's 1617 book of emblems.

The salamander was thought to be born of fire.

If one can say that hot-glass workers have a mascot, it is without any doubt the salamander. Since ancient times, this lizard-like, poisonous skinned amphibian was ascribed to exist within fire, even to be born out of the flames. According to legend, its cold body allowed it to survive the heat. To see one in the flames of a furnace was considered good luck, but glassblowers who suddenly disappeared (to work elsewhere) were said to have been "eaten by the salamander." 

Glass work has always been a hot, sweaty, exhausting affair. It is not surprising that after a long day's labor one might honestly think they saw small animals scampering around in the fire. The legend, however, is an ancient one; Aristotle, in his History of Animals reported that salamanders were thought to possess the ability to put out fire with their bodies. They became part of the lore among glassmakers in Venice on Murano and were even spotted in Antonio Neri's Florence. In his autobiography (1558-1567), Florentine artist Benvenuto Cellini offers this recollection:

When I was about five years old my father happened to be in a basement-chamber of our house, where they had been washing, and where a good fire of oak-logs was still burning; he had a viol in his hand, and was playing and singing alone beside the fire. The weather was very cold. Happening to look into the fire, he spied in the middle of those most burning flames a little creature like a lizard, which was sporting in the core of the intensest coals. Becoming instantly aware of what the thing was, he had my sister and me called, and pointing it out to us children, gave me a great box on the ears, which caused me to howl and weep with all my might. Then he pacified me good-humouredly, and spoke as follows: 'My dear little boy, I am not striking you for any wrong that you have done, but only to make you remember that that lizard which you see in the fire is a salamander, a creature which has never been seen before by anyone of whom we have credible information.' So saying he kissed me and gave me some pieces of money.

Incidentally, at the end of Cellini's life, family friend and Church canon  Piero della Stufa was appointed to settle his estate. Among other items, he was entrusted with the manuscript for Cellini's autobiography, from which the above quote is taken. Della Stufa was also the godfather to Antonio Neri's younger brother Vincenzio.
  

(Quotation from: J. Addington Symonds "Benvenuto Cellini's Autobiography" in Harvard Classics v. 31, Charles W. Elliot, ed. (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1910), p. 11 (book I, ch. V.))
* This post first appeared here, in a somewhat different form on 19 August 2013.

Neri's Other Ruby Glass

 

Rhodochrosite, from the Sweet Home Mine, Colorado.

Antonio Neri is widely recognized for publishing a recipe for the coveted and difficult gold ruby glass. "Rubino," as it is sometimes called, achieves a deep ruby red color utilizing only powdered metallic gold as a colorant. Perhaps because of the notoriety of that prescription, Neri’s other transparent red glass is hardly known. His recipe #120 describes a deep red pigment based on manganese. Today manganese takes its place on the periodic table as an elemental metal, but in the early seventeenth century it had not been isolated from its mineral ore. What Neri calls manganese was actually its oxide, which occurs as a black powdery material. Its effects in glass have been known since the early Egyptian dynasties and before that, as a pottery glaze. By itself the oxide produces a tint often likened to violet or amethyst. In small quantities, it is used to neutralize the slight green tint introduced by iron impurities in clear glass. 

To make his ruby red pigment, Neri starts with high quality manganese oxide from Piedmont and processes it through several alchemical operations. I will not be delving into the chemistry in detail here, suffice it to say that he comes close to synthesizing a highly unstable explosive, the likes of which was not "discovered" for another two centuries. It is a striking illustration of how technical ability can be in place long before theory catches up, in this case thankfully so. 

The pigment he did succeed in making is for now a mystery. Manganese carbonate, which can form ruby red crystals might fit the bill, except that it decomposes at the temperatures of molten glass. It occurs in nature as the mineral rhodochrosite as seen above. [1] Below is Neri's recipe for "Transparent Red in Glass" from his 1612 book L’Arte Vetraria. Most of the terminology is straightforward, with the exception of a few terms. 'Porphyry' is a hard granite used for grinding stones. 'Reverberation' is indirect radiation in a furnace, where the heat is reflected from the walls. 'Sublimation' is when certain materials vaporize directly from a solid form and recondense without passing through a liquid phase.

Grind manganese impalpably, then mix it with an equal amount of refined saltpeter and put it into a clay pan set to the fire, reverberating and calcining it for 24 hours. Take it then and wash its saltiness away with warm common water. Once separated from the salt, let it dry. It will be a ruby-red color. With this, mix an equal weight of sal ammoniac and grind them together over porphyry stone with distilled vinegar, which they will soak up. Leave this alone to dry and then put it in a retort with a wide body and a long neck. Heat it in sand for 12 hours to sublimate. 

Then break up the glass. Take all the deposits in the neck and body of the retort and mix it with the residual remains in the bottom. Weigh it and combine it all with as much sal ammoniac as was lost in the first sublimation. Grind everything together over the porphyry stone, with distilled vinegar for it to soak up. Then put it in a retort to sublimate as above. Repeat this sublimation, in this manner, many times until in the end, the manganese will all remain fusible in the bottom. 

This is the medicine that tints crystal and pastes in a diaphanous red color and a ruby red as well. Use 20 oz of this medicine per ounce of cristallo or glass, but more or less may be used accordingly to govern the color. The manganese should be the very best from Piedmont, so that it will have the effect of tinting the glass a beautiful ruby color and be a sight of wonderment.

[1] Manganese carbonate, MnCO3.

Arminia Vivarini

 

Nef Ewer, Late 16th century, Murano Italy.
Courtesy Milwaukee Art Museum

On the afternoon of Friday, 22 March 1521, The Venetian Senate - then called the ‘Pregadi’ - reconvened after lunch. Senator Marino Sanuto (the Younger) recorded in his now famous diary that among the afternoon business was the granting of a ten year exclusive license to Arminia, the daughter of painter ‘Alvise da Muran’ (Luigi Vivarini). She was granted this privilege to produce the ornamental glass galley ships she had recently devised. [1,2] Once called 'Navicella' (little ships) these ewers, probably most used to serve wine, are now known as ‘nefs’. A pour spout was situated at the ship's bow, and often a handle astern. These objects soon became iconic symbols of the island-nation’s long dominance in trade, and regularly appeared on sideboards and elaborate dinner table settings, not only in the lagoon, but in Florence, Rome and far beyond.

In their Objects of Virtue: Art in Renaissance Italy, Syson and Thornton write,

“It was not only the use of coloured canes in complex patterns embedded into clear glass that typified Venetian glass from the 1520s, but also the manipulation of cristallo into ever more fantastic forms. Novelties were first displayed at the Ascension Day Fair, which, like visits to the glasshouses in Murano itself, was firmly on the tourist map by about 1500. The Venetian diarist Marino Sanuto mentions the work displayed at three booths at the fair in 1525, those of Barovier, Serena and Ballarin workshops ‘among other things, a galley and a very beautiful ship were to be seen.’”

Syson and Thornton continue, “Leandro Alberti singled out just this kind of glass in his famous description of the marvels of Murano in his Description of All Italy of 1550: ‘I saw there (among other things made of glass) a scaled-down model of a galley, one braccia long and with all its rigging and equipment, so perfectly in scale that it seemed impossible to model such things accurately in such a medium.” [3]

Scholar and science investigator, Georgius Agricola, described a vessel in the form of a ship in his De re metallica published in Basel in 1556,

“The glass-makers make diverse things, such as goblets, cups [...] and ships, all of which excellent and wonderful works I have seen when I spent two whole years in Venice some time ago. Especially at the time of the Feast of the Ascension they were on sale at M[u]rano, where are located the most celebrated glass-works. These I saw on other occasions, and when, for a certain reason, I visited Andrea Naugerio in his house which he had there, and conversed with him and Francisco Asulano.” [4]

Arminia Vivarini’s father was a painter of some renown, but her family is also among the earliest recorded glassmakers on Murano. Her third-great grandfather, named Vivarino, arrived from Padua, just ahead of the plague in 1346. [5] The family seems to have been involved in the craft on the island from then on. She clearly had access to a furnace, perhaps one owned by an uncle or a cousin. In any event, she exemplified the qualities of the very best glass artisans throughout history: a clear design sense coupled with technical expertise and the opportunity to put them both into practice.

Her very existence also forces us to more closely examine the well worn narrative that hot-shops were exclusively male domains, from which women were strictly excluded. In such a highly competitive arena, it is perfectly reasonable that a family would promote its best talent, regardless of gender. In many ways, we owe homage to Vivarini for her success with this style of novelty glass object; it started the genre that continues in popularity today, five centuries later, with works of art prized by collectors and in museums around the world. [6]

[1] Arminia  (Armenia, Ermonia) Vivarini (1490-1569). See Luigi Zecchin: Vetro e Vetrai di Murano, 3 vols. (Venezia: Arsenale, 1987-9) v.3, p. 194.

[2] Marino Sanudo: I diarii di Marino Sanuto (1466-1536)  v.30. Eds., F. Stefani, G. Berchet, N. Barozzi (Venezia: Fratelli Visentini, 1891) col. 45. Also see Zecchin 1987-9, v.2, p.276.
[3] Luke Syson, Dora Thornton: Objects of Virtue: Art in Renaissance Italy (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2001), p. 197.

[4]  Georgius Agricola (Georg Bauer): De Re Metallica: Tr. from the 1st Latin Ed. of 1556… trns: Herbert Hoover, Lou Henry Hoover. (Princeton: Mining Magazine, 1912), p. 592 (Book XII.)

[5] op. Cit. Zecchin 1987-9, v.3, p194-5.
[6] Thanks to Sophie Small‏ @sophieesmall for inspiring the subject of this post.

Anna Agnew, Champion Glassblower

 

Anna J. Agnew,
Chicago Tribune, 9 March 1902, p. 43

In the spring of 1902, newspapers around the United States reported that eighteen-year-old Anna Agnew, of Norwood Pennsylvania had been proclaimed a “champion glass blower.” Stories in New York, Pennsylvania, Alabama, Virginia, Florida, Chicago and Arizona described how she was able to blow several thousand pieces of medical glassware per day. Speaking to the rigors of her profession, she stated that in the past two years her lungs had become stronger and that she had “increased in weight from 110 to 130 pounds since taking up men’s work.” When asked if she was a member of the glass workers’ union, she replied “No, as the hateful men would not take women in as active members.” [1]

Agnew worked for the glass house of the H. K. Mulford Company, a pioneering pharmaceutical outfit that grew out of the first apothecary in Philadelphia, founded in 1823. The facility was located just outside the city in idyllic Glenolden. The owners had made a strategic decision to attract a female labor force for their line of torch-made scientific glassware and sterile containers. The women “have a delicacy of touch and a deftness which make them specially fitted for expertness.” [2] Their superintendent said, “I’ve been in this business from boyhood up, and I know what I am talking about when I say that no men can turn out such good work as these girls do. [Male] glass blowers would be astonished if they looked in on this factory. The girls are infinitely more careful and painstaking than men have ever thought of being, and they are achieving results never before known in the trade.” [3]

In the not-so-distant history of American glass work, women played a strong but understated and now all but forgotten role. Anna Agnew fabricated antitoxin bulbs, goose-necks, and did ‘fancy’ glass work besides. Her female co-workers were experts at producing capillary tubes, hermetically sealed ampules and homeopathic vials. But the appreciation of female glass workers was not by any means confined to the Mulford company. Elsewhere, women around the country were specifically recruited as glass workers in other fields. From the tiny Moore Pushpin (thumb-tack) company [4] to the burgeoning incandescent light bulb industry. As Agnew and her co-workers honed their skills in the east, the Houston Electrical Supply Company in Texas advertised for “Lady Glass Blowers” experienced with incandescent lamps. Even earlier, In the 1890’s Edison’s General Electric company was running help wanted ads for “Female Glass Tubulators and Stem Makers” for his incandescent light bulb factory in Harrison, New Jersey. [5] There, women composed the vast majority of blowers making glass bases and envelopes for light bulbs. By 1918 General Electric maintained 36 lamp factories around the world, and the women at the Harrison plant met to discuss forming a union of their own. [6] Still later women became vital to the manufacture of vacuum tubes for electronics, and by the 1940’s they were working side by side with their male counterparts at the hot-glass furnaces of the Libbey glass company in Toledo, Ohio. [7]

The appreciation of female glass workers by industry in the late 1800s did not materialize out of thin air; far from it. In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that every man, woman and child in America had heard of, read about, or seen a lady glassblower ply her craft in person. They were a widely popular attraction at county fairs, circus sideshows and dime museums. In an era when traveling performers were the premier form of entertainment in the country, glass blowers working over a torch were especially popular with women and children. Audience members could expect to walk away with a small glass toy; a model ship, an animal or a flower made entirely of glass. To see a woman making such objects was icing on the cake, a fact not lost on show managers and promoters. By the last decade of the 19th century, there were troupes entirely composed of “lady glass blowers” traveling the country, headlining their own exhibitions.

Anna Agnew was the daughter of a Philadelphia sewing machine salesman. After her stint with Mulford, she married trolley car conductor Harry Stewart and as far as can be determined, retired from the fire-arts to raise a family. She died at age 74 in Philadelphia in 1957. Other women continued their career in glass throughout their lives. There is a strong and proud tradition of women glass workers in the arts and industry that carries over from Europe and runs like a golden thread right through the entire history of the United States since its earliest days.



[1] “Girl Champion Glassblower” Chicago Tribune: Chicago, Illinois, 9 March 1902, p. 43.
[2] “Glass-Blower Girls” The Buffalo Enquirer: Buffalo, New York, 29 July 1904, p. 5.
[3] Day, Mary Edith, “Girls Who Blow Glass” Reading Times: Reading, Pennsylvania, 14 May 1902, p. 3.
[4] “Help Wanted” The Philadelphia Enquirer: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, p. 40.
[5] “Female Help Wanted” The Boston Globe: Boston, Massachusetts, p. 9.
[6] “Have Mass Meeting of Lamp Works Employees” The Fort Wayne Sentinel: Fort Wayne, Indiana,  31 December, 1918, p. 3.
[7] Rosellen Callahan, "Lady Glassblowers Wend Their Way Into 'For Men Only' Trade", Fort Lauderdale News: Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 5 August, 1943, p. 6.

Thomas Edison's Lady Glassblower

 

Fig. 1. 
Sealing the Glass Socket and
Carbon Filament into the Flask of an Incandescent Lamp.
"We will next turn to the glass-blowing department, where
hundreds of girls are employed in all the delicate and skillful 
manipulations involved in the glasswork of these lamps"
-Henry Morton, Scribner's Magazine, Vol. 6, 1889

On a cold Monday afternoon in December of 1888, Thomas Edison, his wife Mina and their children arrived in Akron, Ohio, on the 12:17 train. They had traveled from their estate ‘Glenmont’ in West Orange, New Jersey, to visit Mina’s parents for the holidays. That same evening, after dinner, Edison and his father-in-law, Lewis Miller, donned winter coats and walked to a nearby station of the Akron Electric Light Co. where they inspected one of Edison’s dynamo generators that had recently been installed. The dynamo was wired by dedicated copper lines to ‘Oak Place’, Miller’s residence. Upon returning to the house, the family assembled on the third floor, along with a newspaper reporter, where a “mammoth Christmas tree” stood. That year, the tree was adorned with ornaments, tinsel, and also a special addition: forty incandescent lamps that, with a flick of a switch, blazed to life.[1] There is every chance that each of those forty lamps was crafted by female hands at Edison’s Harrison, New Jersey, factory.

Early on, Edison decided on a female crew of flamework glass artisans to perform the delicate manipulations of assembling and finishing the incandescent lamp bulbs, (fig. 1). These specialists crafted the glass parts of the lamps in a complex series of steps. The ‘stem’ makers formed a glass seal around the electrical wires that held the delicate filament in place. The ‘tubulators’ put a small hole in the top of the bulb and attached the glass tubing used to pump the air out of the bulb. Mating the stem to the bulb in an air-tight seal without cracking or damaging either was an art unto itself. All the while, workers needed to adapt on-the-fly to continual changes in materials, procedures and tools as the bulbs evolved and improved. What is known, is that in the early days,  production took place at the laboratory in Menlo Park. As demand for the lamps started to explode, a “shed” for the glass work was built on the grounds and then expanded. Because of the rural location of the laboratory, there was a continual problem of recruiting qualified workers. Around 1880, Edison turned to the employment of school-aged girls and boys to fill the labor shortage. Here he got a first hand look at what they were capable of, and apparently made his decision to go with all girls. The use of women and girls for this glass work was a tradition that continued for nearly five decades, through the transition into General Electric Co., right up until the work was fully automated.

It was a year earlier, in the spring of 1879 that Edison first made the announcement that he was ready to begin producing electric lamps. Newspapers at the time gave great credit to a German glassblower working for Edison, for bringing the inventor’s research to fruition. This was Ludwig Boehm. He previously worked for Heinrich Geissler in Bonn, Germany, producing electrical discharge tubes and vacuum pumps.[2]  Boehm possessed the glassblowing skills to quickly whip out one test lamp after another, but he also knew how to make the coveted vacuum pumps invented by Geissler. These were the leading edge of vacuum pump technology, far faster and more efficient at evacuating the air out of the lamps than other methods of the time. Edison’s achievement would have been impossible without Geissler’s work and it was Ludwig Boehm, the glassblower, who was the information conduit on the pumps.

By 1882, a new ‘Lamp Works’ factory was ready in Harrison, near metropolitan Newark. It had more floor space than they could possibly ever use, or so they thought. By 1889, Henry Morton, the president of Stevens Institute of technology wrote, “Hundreds of girls are employed in all the delicate and skillful manipulations involved in the glasswork of these lamps.”[3]

Fig. 2.
Laboratory notebook entry
signed solely by Mina Edison.

Edison kept a series of laboratory notebooks documenting experiments and potential solutions to problems, and for the lamps there were many problems. The entries are often signed by Edison himself or his assistants. It is interesting to note that for a period, his wife Mina co-signed some of Edison’s entries and several pages appear in her name alone. This shows her active participation at some level in events of the laboratory.[4] Fig. 2 shows an example of a page signed by Mina Edison, Dated 23 March 1886 with three diagrams of lamps. The top diagram is accompanied by text reading “Make lamps of all kinds of glass and list conductivity.” The next diagram shows a bulb with a special electrode off to the side. The text reads “polished silver. Also one of polished hard rubber.” The third diagram shows a lamp with two filaments and appears to read “copper filament to take out curr[ent] 10-” While the intent of these experimental setups may be lost, what is clear is that she possessed a working understanding of how the lamps functioned and she was proficient at circuit diagrams. Whether she influenced the decision to use female glass workers is an open question.

To become one of Edison’s glass technicians meant steady work in a booming industry, it also meant a first-hand introduction to divisive labor problems common to factories at the end of the 19th century. In the summer of 1889, the general manager of the lamp works took a trip to Europe and, based on British glass blowing practices, he ordered his superintendent in Harrison to immediately cut pay and institute a list of new work rules. The superintendent procrastinated, knowing a disaster in the making when he saw one. Upon the manager’s return in October, the superintendent was fired and the new rules and wages were posted. “The workmen immediately commenced to walk out, and it is likely that the entire force of two hundred will strike” wrote one reporter.[5] Four weeks later, the papers announced that “The girls employed in Edison’s lamp works at Harrison, N J, will go on strike today because of a reduction in wages.”[6] Four years later, an unrelated incident at the lampworks made the papers. It illustrates that even with a good work record and no problems with management, simply getting in through the front door unscathed was not a given. “There was a small riot at the Edison Lamp Works in Harrison, this morning, between several hundred men who were waiting about the gates of the establishment for work. Some objected to the presence of a number of Polish Jews and a free fight ensued, which resulted in a number being badly bruised. The police dispersed the crowd.”[7]

Fig. 3.
Wanted ad for Edison’s Harrison Lampworks factory.
The Boston Globe (Boston Massachusetts)
22 June 1894, Fri., p. 9.

Through it all, the business continued to expand by leaps and bounds. A continual stream of “wanted” advertisements ran in papers as far away as Boston (Fig. 3.) In 1896, Harper’s Magazine reported that  Edison’s lamp factory at Harrison employed “several hundred girls and men” turning out over six-million lamps per year.[8] Even with long hours and partial automation, the line would require at least a couple-hundred glass workers for the delicate hand-work necessary in order to produce what amounted to a new lamp finished every two seconds on the clock.[9]

In the early 1900s the processes for making the lamps was further automated, with women still running much of the equipment. By 1903 a single worker could turn out 600 completed bulbs per day.[10]  By 1912 the Harrison plant employed a total of 4000 workers. In 1918 the women glass workers at the plant met to discuss forming their own union in order to institute an apprentice system to ensure the trade remained healthy.[11] Ultimately the entire lamp factory was closed in 1929 and the work was distributed to more modern and fully automated facilities around the country.[12]

Fig. 4.
Finishing work by women on tungsten lamps, c.1927.
(Shortly before the manufacture of lamp bulbs was fully automated)
Notice the striking similarities to fig. 1. above, from
the same facility, 40 years earlier.

The individual women and girls who worked for the electric lamp factory in Harrison can be traced to some extent through census records. A survey of the 1900 US census found over a hundred female respondents listing the Edison Lamp Works as their place of employment [13] The oldest was Elizabeth Stultz aged 45, the youngest Tillie Glinik just 13. There were a number of sisters there working glass side-by-side. Mary and Carrie Wright were 26 and 16 respectively, while Barbara, Christina and Annie Etzel were 19, 18 and 17.[14]

There is also evidence that the use of female glassworkers for Edison carried overseas to his British lamp making operation. As an 18-year-old, Florence Small who lived in a suburb north of London, worked making glass ‘stems’ for the Edison and Swan Electric Light Company (Royal Ediswan). In 1911, she worked at their Ponders End facility in her hometown of Enfield. She thought enough of the experience to include that detail in her will, fifty years later.[15]

Those forty lamps on the Miller’s Christmas tree in 1888, along with millions of other lamps were created by the skilled female flameworkers of the Edison and later General Electric lamp works in Harrison. It is quite a legacy that from the time of the introduction of electric lamps in 1879, all the way to the invention of television in 1927, the delicate glasswork of the electric lighting industry was firmly entrusted to the competent hands of women.

[1] “A Talk With Edison”, The Summit County Beacon (Akron, Ohio), 2 Jan 1889, Wed, Page 7

[2] “A Very Skillful Glass-Blower” Chicago Tribune (Chicago, Illinois), 4 January 1880, Sun, p. 10. In US Census records and laboratory notebooks Boehm spells his own name “Ludwig K Böhm”. In later life, he reinvented himself as a patent attorney in New York.

[3] Henry Jackson Morton, “Electricity in Lighting” Scribner’s Magazine 1889 vol. VI, pp. 19-23 [compiled, pp. 176-200], (Charles Scribner’s Sons: New York) p. 192.

[4] 03/18/1886 Edison, Thomas Alva -- Technical Notes and Drawings (Edison, Mina Miller (Mrs Thomas A.)) Incandescent lamp [N314] Notebook Series -- Fort Myers Notebooks: N-86-03-18 (1886) [N314003; TAEM 42:815] Courtesy of Thomas Edison National Historical Park.

[5] The Nebraska State Journal (Lincoln, Nebraska), 12 October 1889, Sat. p. 4.

[6] The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York), 11 November 1889, Mon. p. 4.

[7] “Edison Lamp Works Riot.” Reading Times (Reading, Pennsylvania), 5 Dec. 1893, Tue. p. 4.

[8] R. R. (Richard Rodgers) Bowker “Electricity, a Great American Industry”, Harper’s Magazine, Oct 1896, vol. 32, p. 710.

[9] In 1892 Edison began to automate the process of forming the outer bulbs, ultimately farming the work out to Corning Glassworks.

[10] John W. Howell And Henry Schroeder, “History of the Incandescent Lamp” (The Maqua Company: Schenectady, New York ,1927), pp. 165-172.

[11] “Have Mass Meeting of Lamp Works Employes” (sic.), The Fort Wayne Sentinel (Fort Wayne, Indiana) 31 December 1918, p. 3.

[12] In 1932 the Harrison factory was re-purposed for the Radiophone Corporation of America. RCA, which produced electronic tubes until 1976. The site was ultimately leveled and is now home to a shopping mall.

[13] Combinations of search terms targeted females working at the Harrison, New Jersey Edison/General Electric Lamp Works. Women found working there, but not listing a specific profession could have worked non glass blowing jobs. Conversely, many who were glass workers at the plant left the census field for 'employment' blank, or were not asked by the census taker and therefore not found in the search.

[14] No candidates could be found in the 1880 US census, and the 1890 census was largely destroyed in a fire at the Commerce Dept. in 1921.

[15] Probate details for Florence Small provided by https://www.terrys.org.uk/charts/c/crack301.htm

Fig. 1: Sealing the Glass Socket and Carbon Filament into the Flask of an Incandescent Lamp. 1889

Fig. 2: Laboratory notebook entry signed solely by Mina Edison.

Fig. 3: Wanted ad for Edison’s Harrison Lampworks factory. The Boston Globe (Boston Massachusetts) 22 June 1894, Fri., p. 9.

Fig. 4: Finishing work on tungsten lamps, c.1927.