FLINT GLASS broadly includes all the myriad forms of glass except window-panes and dark bottles. The lead, which the true flint glass alone contains, gives it a characteristic brilliancy and weight. The pure English flint is the French `crystal.' It rings like metal, is heavier than any other glass, and shines as none did before its invention. It is the choicest material for table and cut ware, for optical glass, and for the best blown and pressed ware that fills the household. An extra proportion of lead makes it `strass,' from which artificial gems are made. The 'lime flint' has a lighter weight and a lustre approach ing 'lead-flint,' but it does not equal its royal superior. From this the ordinary utensils are made.
A flint-glass establishment, is the most fas cinating of glass-houses, as it generally includes blowing, molding, and pressing. A wine-glass is made from a glowing bulb as large as a peach. A breath swells it into a hollow sphere the size of the bowl. The gatherer attaches a small knob of 'soft glass, and draws it out into the stem, and on the end of this presses a bell-shaped base, previously hardened, which is flattened out into a stable foundation. Shears cut free the top of the bowl, and the furnace rounds the edge. So, from three pieces, the ordinary wine-glasses and similar-shaped vessels are made. The cost lier kind has the stem drawn out of the original sphere. and the base, blown separately like a tiny
disk of crown glass, is united by its heat to the upper part. All the best 'hollow ware' is blown either in the air and finished by hand for the higher grades, or in molds, which produce the dimmer surface of common qualities. All trans parent druggists' or prescription bottles are of flint glass, but are made like the green glass bottles. A good workman can blow 4800 small `prescriptions' in a day of ten hours. The com bination of colors in flint-glass work is particu larly interesting. From the pots, where several hues of glass are fused adjacently, the blower dips two or three contrasting layers, all appear ing one, and works them as a single lump into a globe, or shade, or vase. These can be cut in cameo style, or twisted into ingenious displays of their structure. The fancy vases, globes, pitchers, etc., with high or low relief patterns, are blown into molds and finished by hand. The perplexing skein-work of interlaced threads of color in a body of transparent glass is produced by wind ing threads of colored glass, which are then shaped into any hollow pattern or pressed solid into pretty marbles. Machinery has been used with marked success in the manufacture of tumblers and lamp-chimneys, and compressed air employed instead of the breath of the glass blower.