The electric light, acetylene, magnesium, and other modern sources of light, although they may be more brilliant and intense than coal gas, cannot compete in cheapness of production with the latter. Thus far illuminating coal gas is still the queen of artificial lights.
After gas was fairly started in lighting streets and buildings its adaptation to lamps followed; and among the most noted of gas lamps is that of Von Welsbach, who combined a bunsen gas flame and a glass chimney with a “mantle” located therein. This mantle is a gauze-like structure made of refractory quartz, or of certain oxides, which when heated by the gas flame produce an incandescent glow of intense brilliancy, with a reduced consumption of gas.
[CHAPTER XXXI.]
BRICK, POTTERY, GLASS, PLASTICS.
When the nineteenth century dawned, men were making brick in the same way for the most part that they were fifty centuries before. It is recorded in the eleventh chapter of Genesis that when “the whole earth was of one language and one speech, it came to pass as they journeyed from the east that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there, and they said to one another, Go to, let us make brick and burn them thoroughly, And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.” Then commenced the building of Babel. Who taught the trade to the brick-makers of Shinar?
The journey from the east continued, and with it went brick making to Greece and Rome, across the continent of Europe, across the English channel, until the brick work of Cæsar, stamped by the trade mark of his legions, was found on the banks of the Thames, and through the fields of Caerleon and York.
Alfred the Great encouraged the trade, and the manufacture flourished finely under Henry VIII., Elizabeth and Charles I.
As to Pottery:—Could we only know who among the peoples of the earth first discovered, used, or invented fire, we might know who were the first makers of baked earthenware. Doubtless the art of pottery arose before men learned to bake the plastic clay, in that groping time when men, kneading the soft clay with their fingers, or imprinting their footsteps in the yielding surface and learning that the sun’s heat stiffened and dried those forms into durability, applied the discovery to the making of crude vessels, as children unto this day make dishes from the tenacious mud. But the artificial burning of the vessels was no doubt a later imitation of Nature.
Alongside the rudest and earliest chipped stone implements have been found the hollow clay dish for holding fire, or food, or water. “As the fragment of a speech or song, a waking or a sleeping vision, the dream of a vanished hand, a draught of water from a familiar spring, the almost perished fragrance of a pressed flower call back the singer, the loved and lost, the loved and won, the home of childhood, or the parting hour, so in the same manner there linger in this crowning decade of the crowning century bits of ancient ingenuity which recall to a whole people the fragrance and beauty of its past.” Prof. O. T. Mason. The same gifted writer, adds: “Who has not read, with almost breaking heart, the story of Palissy, the Huguenot potter? But what have our witnesses to say of that long line of humble creatures that conjured out of prophetic clay, without wheels or furnace, forms and decorations of imperishable beauty, which are now being copied in glorified material in the best factories of the world? In ceramic as well as textile art the first inventors were women. They quarried the clay, manipulated it, constructed and decorated the ware, burned it in a rude furnace and wore it out in a hundred uses.”