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| Plate W in James Bisset's Magnificent Directory (1800). |
A page from Bisset's Magnificent Directory printed in 1800 depicting glass blowing at Jones, Smart and Co. who were glassmakers at Aston Hill in Birmingham.
The frontage of the manufactory was a smart late eighteenth-century structure topped with an urn with the glass cone behind, the glass cone being a chimney with a furnace at the centre and space around for the glassworkers. An underground flue provided a draught forcing the smoke up through the chimney. Glass cones looked like pottery kilns but the similarities were purely aesthetic, and the cone was unique to British glassmaking. Only four survive across the country.*
As well as the central furnace, smaller furnaces were around the edges to keep the glass hot whilst forming it. The image depicts two glassblowers as well as a boy shovelling coal. The curtains drawn back suggest that the process was being revealed to view, and this was very likely the first named glass cone interior depicted in print.**
The four surviving glass cones are the Red House Cone in Wordsley, West Midlands; the Lemington Glass Works in Newcastle upon Tyne; the Catcliffe Cone in the village of the same name in South Yorkshire; and the Northern Glass Cone in Alloa, Scotland.
Notes
* 'Industrial Heritage: British Glass', New Scientist, 63 (1974) 41-42 (p. 42).
** Jenni Dixon, 'Tourist Experience and the Manufacturing Town: James Bisset's Magnificent Directory of Birmingham', in Pen, Print and Communication in the Eighteenth Century (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), pp. 169-183 (p. 177).
- The Art of Glass Blowing (London: Bumpus and Griffin, 1831).