pounds, and when he blew something had to happen.  I arrived at his place of labor just as the shifts were being changed—­a glass-furnace is worked continuously, in three eight-hour shifts—­and as the little whistle blew to announce the end of his day’s toil the giant grabbed the last wand, dropped it into the waiting mold, and blew a mighty blast.  A bubble of glass sprang from the mouth of the mold, swelled to two feet in diameter, and burst with a bang, filling the air with shimmering flakes of glass, light enough to be wafted like motes.  When the shining shower had settled and I had opened my eyes—­it would not be pleasant to get an eyeful of those beautiful scraps—­the huge blower was diminishing in perspective toward his dinner, and the furnace door was, for the moment, without its usual hustling congregation of workers.  I made bold to investigate the platform.

Close to me glared the mouth of the furnace, with masses of silver threads depending from it like the beard of some fiery gulleted ogre—­the strings of glass left by the withdrawal of the wand.  The heat three feet away was enough to make sand melt and run like water, but I was not unpleasantly warm.  This was because I stood at the focus of three tin pipes, thru which streams of cold air, fan-impelled, beat upon me.  Without this cooling agent it would be impossible for men to work so close to the heat of the molten glass.

Later, in the cool offices of the company, where the roar of the furnaces penetrated only as a dull undertone, and electric fans whizzed away the heat of the summer afternoon, I learned more of the technique of the bottle industry.  Each shape demanded by the trade requires a special mold, made of cast iron and cut according to the design submitted.  There are, of course, standard shapes for standard bottles; these are alluded to (reversing the usual practise of metonymy) by using thing contained for container, as “ginger ales,” “olives,” “mustards,” “sodas” and (low be it spoken) “beers.”  But when a firm places an order for bottles of a particular shape, or ones with lettering in relief on the glass, special molds must be made; and after the lot is finished the molds are useless till another order for that particular design comes in.  A few standard molds are made so that plates with lettering can be inserted for customers who want trademarks or firm names on their bottles; but the great majority of the lettered bottles have their own molds, made especially for them and unable to be used for any other lot.

All bottles are blown in molds; it is in the handling of the molten glass and the actual blowing that machinery has come to take the place of men in the glass industry.  The first type of machine to be developed was for blowing the bottle and finishing it, thus doing away with three of the six men formerly employed in making one bottle.  In appearance the bottle-blowing machine is merely two circular platforms, revolving in the same horizontal plane, each carrying five molds.