"Being a director of a plate-glass company I have made it my business to learn all that books could teach me on the subject."
"I should like to see glass made," said the vociferous admirer of Dr. Johnson, "especially plate-glass."
To this, the other replied, with ready politeness, "If your wish be very strong, and you have an hour to spare, I shall be happy to show you the works to which I am going—those of the Thames Plate Glass Company. They are close by."
"The fact is," was the reply, "Mrs. Bossle (I'm sorry to say Mrs. Bossle is an invalid) expects me down to Gravesend to tea; but an hour won't matter much."
"And you, sir?" said the civil gentleman, addressing me.
My desire was equally strong, and the next hour equally my own; for, as the friend, whom a negligent public had driven to emigration, was not to sail until the next morning, it did not much matter whether I took my last farewell of him at Gravesend early or late that evening.
Tracking our guide through dock gates, over narrow drawbridges, along quays; now, dodging the rigging of ships; now, tripping over cables, made "taut" to rings; now falling foul of warping-posts (for it was getting dusk); one minute, leaping over deserted timber; the next, doubling stray casks; the next, winding among the strangest ruins of dismantled steamboats, for which a regular hospital seemed established in that region of mud and water; then, emerging into dirty lanes, and turning the corners of roofless houses; we finished an exciting game of Follow-my-Leader, at a pair of tall gates. One of these admitted us into the precincts of the southernmost of the six manufactories of plate glass existing in this country.
The first ingredient in making glass, to which we were introduced, was contained in a goodly row of barrels in full tap, marked with the esteemed brand of "Truman, Hanbury, Buxton, and Co." It is the well-known fermented extract of malt and hops, which is, it seems, nearly as necessary to the production of good plate glass, as flint and soda. To liquefy the latter materials by means of fire is, in truth, dry work; and our cicerone explained, that seven pints per day, per man, of Messrs. Truman, Hanbury, Buxton, and Company's Entire, has been found, after years of thirsty experience, to be absolutely necessary to moisten human clay, hourly baked at the mouths of blazing furnaces. These furnaces emit a heat more intense than the most perspiring imagination can conceive, or the stanchest thermometer indicate. An attempt to ascertain the degree of heat was once made: a pyrometer (a thermometer of the superlative degree, or "fire-measurer"), was applied to the throat of a furnace—for every furnace has its mouth, its throat, and its flaming tongues; but the wretched instrument, after five minutes' scorching, made an expiring effort to mark thirteen hundred degrees above boiling point, cracked, was shivered into bits, and was finally swallowed up by the insatiable element whose proceedings it had presumptuously attempted to register.
Having, by this time, crossed a yard, we stood on the edge of a foul creek of the Thames, so horribly slimy, that a crocodile or an alligator, or any scaly monster of the Saurian period, seemed much more likely to be encountered in such a neighborhood than the beautiful substance that makes our modern rooms so glittering and bright; our streets so dazzling, and our windows at once so radiant and so strong.
"In order to understand our process thoroughly," said the obliging director of the seven acres of factory and the four hundred operatives we had come to see, "we must begin with the beginning. This," picking up from a heap a handful of the finest of fine sand—the glittering pounce, in fact, with which our forefathers spangled their writing—"is the basis of all glass. It is the whitest, most highly pulverized flint sand that can be procured. This comes from Lynn, on the coast of Norfolk. Its mixture with the other materials is a secret, even to us. We give the man who possesses it a handsome salary for exercising his mystery."