A TEMPLE TO VULCAN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18461, 26 July 1923, Page 8

A TEMPLE TO VULCAN.

MAKING OF GLASS BOTTLES. AUCKLAND'S NEW INDUSTRY DEMONSTRATION OF WORK. ■■■•' If Vulcan is the deity of the forge he is at least high priest of the 'glass fur- j nace. No iron foundry at work is more spectacular than a glass works where by intense heat • and human- ingenuity ordinary white sand with some soda ash and ah ingredient or two: not announced from the house-tops is: turned into bottles in the twinkling of an eye. A common thing a bottle, a pathetic thing when empty. Even when it contains the nectar of the gods— the clarets and ports ,of . Spain, the. liquid gold of your famous : hock and your matchless dry champagne "-—no one pays regard to the bottle. The label may catch the eye, silver paper about the neck may add to one's sense of wellbeing, but who thinks about the bottle itself and the manner, it was fashioned ? Who realists that sand ground down in countless centuries, washed, perhaps by oceans that have become dry land, is the chief substance in this wonderfully useful article? Who when quaffing. a cool bubbling draught remembers that the thing of glass was made :by the heat of a volcano ./ Last evening : the glass works at Penrose, the first to be established in New .Zealand, were thrown open to the public in aid of the Penrose Hall fund, and- a very large crowd assembled. The glare of the furnaces and the heat, the roar of the compressed air tubes and of the forced draught pipes for cooling purposes, made & setting that caught the imagination of the crowd. It stood fascinated and no amount of shouting by officials could; keep many individuals back from the operators who handled the molten glass. A. glowing furnace ever fascinates the ordinary mortal, whose task in life does not give him a knowledge of its extreme unpleasantness for those, too fami* liar with it. Pie likes to see wheels go round but the fire is really the thing. Probably he is harking back :to the . primitive in which state his ancestors had . no small ■ job in starting the home fires burning. He' still has a kind of awe over the big blaze ana the fierce heat. Through him his primitive ancestors > say "Marvellous." Naturally .everyone who attended was , interested in the process, partly because it is new to New Zealand arid partly because all industrial processes are interesting. But without the glare and the heat the crowd would not have forgotten it? habitual casualncss v In the heat everyone became friendly, and young people seemed to beoome well acquainted. A Million Bunsen Burners,;

To begin at the beginning, wbfch. is the making of the necessary fuel. . Three parts of West Coast - coal is mixed with one part of Newcastle coal for the making of a class of ;; gas which is inflammable only under great heat. The gas is made in a. dark place of mystery, all that the spectator sees being a ' man emptying barrow-loads of coal down shoots leading to chambers where the sunlight of thousands of centuries ago is liberated in the form of a gas which goes to tho furnaces. Ignited, it roars like a million Bunsen burners.' Above is the smelting chamber, into which a man • occasionally shovels sand. The molten mass does not bubble. It burns. The flame is as -great as the flame off the fuel.' It is strange to see a drop of stuff of the consistency - of treacle blazing until it solidifies into glass amber in colour or crystal clear. "At the far end of this fiery furnace there are small • apertures at which stand men, armed with rods, the round ends of which-: are made of .pipeclay. Let', us watch one of these operators, who, -to keen his machine, must dip out enough molten glass to make one bottle every five seconds. His implement is not & measure. , Long practice tolls - him just the amount to pick up each time. Ho , does so by, keeping the rod turning. E"_ch .» portion •>: goes into a mould, > which opens and "H closes on tho hinee system. There are four of these moulds, each moving round a: quarter of the arc of the circle , every ' five seconds. Th© full-mould takes one move and then a press descends and shapes the top of the beetle, arid two stages further *fc roaches a man who opens the- mould, nicks up tho glowing mass, that i? cylindrical .in shape, with tonsrs, and drops it into a mouid of another • set. This passes under a cool air pipe and then reaches the place where a pipe with compressed air descends and blows out -the glass that is now boginning to congeal. .

I Stages cl;, Gradual Ooolingv | .The next move is to another compressed [ air pipe which . ensures that the blowing process is complete , and the next is to a man who < with . tonga removes tho fash' loned bottle that is still red hot. Ho places,them in rows of six, each set of sis being,picked up by a man with a long. handled contrivance. and! placed in •: an ; oven, where, from the . fierce heat of a sulphur fire, tho bottles slo\yfy move to cooler and cooler air, finally reaching daylight cold and tough. This cooling process is most important..' Without it bottles would be as .brittle as some of the Japan. ese glassware that camp to tho Dominion during the war. • - • v.. •; . Last evening amber coloured beer bottles an clear glfiss pickle bottles were being made by mechanical blowing, and also a limited quantity of medicine bottles which are blown by means of human bellows. In this case the molten glass is lifted on the end of a blow pipe, the blowing, of course,; being done" after it has been inserted into the shaped mould. After: this is done the bottlu is again heated in a gas flame arid the; top is hand finished. • Each of the two machines is turning out eleven gross of bottles an hour and in the storing yard there are streets of bottles. The factory is; working night and day. ; The operators ; hava a job which must; be very exacting • Those who dip the smelted glass are relieved - every quarter of; an hour, at the end of which time they have the appearance of firemen in the tropics. ; ,