February 9th, 2018 -- by Bacchus
Do-It-Yourself Tube Girl
Sometimes if a young woman wants to be a tubegirl, she has to do almost all of the hard work herself:
She’s actually a glassworker at a factory in St. Helens during World War 1.
Similar Sex Blogging:
This entry was posted on Friday, February 9th, 2018 at 12:26 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=20405
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=20405
That’s a pretty amazing piece of glass; do you have any idea what its real-world use was?
Yes; in trying to find a better provenance than the Twitter link, which I failed at, I found several “history of glass manufacturing links” that suggested it was a stage in the manufacture of sheet glass; for some reason, glass was cast in cylinders first and then cut into sheets.
One way that large flat sheets of glass were made was indeed by making tubes. The tubes are actually a bubble of glass, scooped up on the end of a blowpipe, then blown in traditional fashion. The glass is held over a trench, and gravity allowed to pull the bottom of the bubble down, stretching the bubble into a tube. When cooled, the top and bottom of the glass tube are cut off, leaving something like what you see above. Then the tube is cut lengthwise with one or two cuts, and placed in a warm-but-not-hot oven, where it slowly flattens out into a flat plate of glass.
The Imperial War Museum has the image in better quality (use the full page then magnification to see just how cute as a button she was) and scant details about it:
https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205087810
This slightly less good reproduction of the photo (though the second image is better) gives the date as 1918 and the photographer as the rather prolific George P(arham) Lewis (1875-1939). He has 1,259 entries in their archive from still life photos of weapons, armour and airplanes through the Royal Family and war artists to foreign workers.
https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205194695
“Little is known about Lewis before he went to work in Indonesia for the Armenian firm, Onnes Kurkdjian, in 1896. His work there was divided between fine, industrial and topographic photography. He returned to Britain in 1917 during the height of the Great War. Although too old for active service, Lewis was keen to assist in the war effort and was assigned to photograph activity on the Home Front. It is for the some 1,300 photographs he took in the following eighteen months that he is most remembered. Lewis was one of only sixteen official British photographers who documented the war, which was the first major conflict to have contemporary photographic iconography.”
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/artists/george-p-lewis
Some more pretty Lancashire glass workers from 1918:
https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205288698
https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205288699
https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205213710
https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205229344
https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205213713
A happy sludge pit worker:
https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205288758
Note that they are all wearing traditional Lancashire clogs except for the sludge pit worker.
https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-women-war-workers-of-the-north-west
I have the best commenters. Thanks!
It has been my understanding that in days of yore (and perhaps even now in underdeveloped countries), window glass was made by blowing the glass first, then fashioning it into a tube, then cutting down the length of the tube to open it up and flatten it, and then cutting it into smaller pieces for windows or what have you. This blowing process is what caused “old” glass to be wavy, NOT the die-hard “fact” that the glass molecule was liquid, and moved for all eternity causing the waviness that one sees in the windows of Montecello for instance. I believe that the blowing is the correct explanation for the distortions. Technically, even the molecules in a sheet of steel are always moving, and yet the steel girders that frame our skyscrapers do not “sag” with age due to this fact. Pretty much ALL molecules of ALL kinds are constantly moving. It’s a mystery…