442 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



was granted. The Legislature voted them a loan of three thou- 

 sand pounds for eight years, three years without interest and five 

 years at five per cent. Three years later the enterprise was moved 

 to Hamilton, a manufacturing town which had just been laid out 

 some ten miles to the west of Albany. The plant consisted of two 

 glass-houses with three large furnaces. Thirteen glass-blowers 

 were employed, and turned out twenty thousand feet of window 

 glass a month — nearly half an acre — besides a fair output of bot- 

 tles and flint glass. The fuel was gathered from the pine forests 

 of the neighborhood. The methods employed seem to have been 

 much the same as elsewhere, except that they were carried out 

 with much system, and that kelp, the ashes of sea-weed, were sub- 

 stituted for the purified potash. The product found a ready mar- 

 ket, and for some time the industry was in a most flourishing 

 condition. But, with the cutting down of the surrounding forests, 

 fuel became more and more scarce. The final abandonment of 

 the enterprise in 1815 is said to have been due to this cause. 



But in none of the colonies were the conditions for glass-mak- 

 ing, and particularly of bottles and the coarser kinds of hollow 

 ware, so entirely favorable as in southern New Jersey. Extensive 

 pine forests covered thousands of acres, while sand of sufficient 

 purity existed in large quantities and had only to be carted a few 

 feet to the glass-house. Qualities which make the region most 

 unpromising for other purposes have devoted it to the use of the 

 glass-maker. For more than a hundred years it has been the 

 home of the bottle trade. About the middle of the last century a 

 glass-house was established in Salem County. It was known as 

 Wistar's, and employed a number of German glass-blowers. Other 

 glass-houses were established throughout the county, illustrating 

 even at that early day the now well-recognized gregariousness of 

 manufactures. Many of them were subsequently abandoned. 

 There was a general exodus of German workmen to the spot, 

 which has since been called Glassborough. Here in 1775 they es- 

 tablished a bottle factory which is still in existence, and is the 

 oldest continuous glass-house in America, as well as the largest 

 of our present bottle factories. It was, however, many years be- 

 fore the manufacture of other grades of glass was attempted. 

 The conditions best adapt the region to the production of green 

 glass. Though window glass has since been successfully made, 

 the competition with other districts farther west is very unequal ; 

 so long as the locality continues to be a glass producer, it will 

 probably always maintain its original place in the glass industry. 



There is a certain picturesqueness about the development of 

 the industry in Pennsylvania. In Penn's time, and indeed for 

 many years after, it was simply a succession of failures, but these 

 failures are hardly less interesting than the successes elsewhere. 



