The Middleton Place Privy House / An Archeological View of Nineteenth Century Plantation Life

by Helen Haskell

LABORATORY GLASS

[Figure 29] is a laboratory beaker of a type manufactured in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, probably a relic of William and Susan Middleton’s inventor son Henry. It is free-blown in lead glass, one of many glass compositions used for American laboratory equipment before Corning Glass Works introduced low-expansion Pyrex glass in 1915.

Figure 29. Free-blown laboratory beaker, probably late 19th or early 20th century.

Henry lived at Middleton Place with his parents until the 1870s, when he went to study at Cambridge University under the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Henry lived in England until his death in 1932.