BOTTLE MAKING.

Northern Advocate, 7 October 1913, Page 3

BOTTLE MAKING.

HOW GLASS IS BLOWN

(Sydney "Sun.")

Every school reading book used to tell how glass was first made. Many hundred years ago a Phoenician ship with a cargo of soda was wrecked on the coast of the Mediterranean, and some of the sailors were saved. They made a fire on the sand, using blocks of soda from the wreck to support their cooking pots. In a little while they were surprised to see a red stream like fiery honey creep out of the fire and roll down the beach. That was the first glass that was ever made. The soda had melted and mixed with the sand.

The story is an old one, and probably untrue, because the Egyptians, who were a much older race than the Phoenicians, know how to make glass several hundred years before the birth of Christ. Still it is a good story, and, if one remembers it, it forms a good introduction to a visit to some of the glass factories about Sydney. One is shown a heap of white sand—it is really a mixture of silicia in the form of sand, sulphate of soda, and potash— and is told that when it is put into a furnace it will melt and become a liquid, and from that liquid will be made the smooth, brittle material that one sees in bottles and tumblers and looking-glases.

The most remarkable thing about a bottle glass factory is the vast quantity of broken glass which one sees there. It really seems as if the workmen made up the glass just to have the pleasure of smashing it to pieces again. Great heaps are piled in out-of-the-way places and in places that are not out. of the way, for one has to scramble round their brittle fringes to go forward. Where there is not glass in pieces it is lying on the ground in a powder so fine that it seems like frost. USE FOR BROKEN GLASS. The broken glass is not made, '_, the factory; it is brought to the factory to ;be melted down and used over again, and it is broken into smaller pieces so as to take up less (room. Wherever the smashing-up is done a fine powder of glass is left on the ground to look like frost until it is trodden into the dust. This broken glass comes mainly from the •bottle yards, which buy from the peripatetic bottle-ohs, and consists of breakages and bottles which cannot be takeri' back into the commerce of Sydney, like, for instance, beer or lemonade bottles. Some bottle-ohs bring their broken bottles straight to the factories, and another source of supply is the tip, where men pick out numerous articles of traffic, including bottles.

At the present time broken glass is not worth more than £1 a ton, tout not long ago factories were paying £4 a ton for it, and were sending out carts of their own trying to collect it. In every factory a certain quantity of new glass is made from the raw material, soda, silica, an 1 , potash, and the broken glass is mixed with it and melted down. BOTTLE MACHINERY. Modern glass bottle factories are worked by gas, but in the older English style of works coal fuel was' used, and the process of making a bottle was much longer. Most of the factories of Sydney started on the English lines, but have now changed to the newer American style. In Germany there is machinery which turns out bottles at incredible speed, but all the work in Sydney is still done by hand. ..Bottle making is one of the few industries where machines have not ousted the skilled tradesman, but the work has been wonderfully specialised, and quite a large number of men take part in the making of the simplest bottle.