Dawn came frozen and hushed to the late winter's day, but it was a good warmth that filled the hall at the great Swedish glassworks, Orrefors. It was here I had come to make my vase.
Having observed some of the greatest blowers of glass in the world at work, I was driven by an urge to create my own signature piece--nothing grand, but a modest vase with, I hoped, a certain lyrical quality.
It started well enough, with words from an old Hindi saying dancing in my mind: "If you are a blower of glass, fashion the cup as if it were to be touched by the lips of your beloved."
One end of the five-foot-long pipe for blowing was thrust into a furnace through an opening called a glory hole and twirled around to collect a gob of molten glass, much as a fork is twirled to gather spaghetti. At a temperature of 2100F the mixture, a variation of the ages-old basic recipe for making glass--silica, sodium carbonate, and calcium oxide, or, simply, sand, soda, and lime--was rude with glaring color, and thick and inching.
Earlier I had watched Juhani Karppinen, an employee at Orrefors for more than 20 years and now a gaffer, or master glassblower, at work and marveled at the way he coaxed form from the molten glass. "You will know by the feel of it on the pipe if it is right," he told me.
Astonishingly, a vase began to take crude shape as I blew into the pipe. I stood atop a box holding the pipe so that it pointed straight down, allowing the blown liquid to swell at the base and pull down to form the start of a neck.
There was more blowing until the glass drew thin and the neck long enough to take the stem of a dahlia. The men assisting me pronounced it done and smiled to signal that it was a vase of some distinction.
It was only after retrieving the piece the next day from the annealing oven, where it was placed to cool over a period of four hours, that I discovered the flaw: When put down, the vase tended to roll from side to side, like a bottle set adrift in the surf.
Glass has been blown that way since the Romans started doing it around 50 B.C. It was long before that, however, when the first man-made glass appeared. The Roman historian Pliny the Elder attributed the discovery to a group of Phoenician sailors who were on a beach preparing to cook over a fire. Finding no stones on which to place their pots, they took from their cargo lumps of natron--an alkali used then in embalming the dead--and rested the pots on them.
When the natron was heated and mingled with the sand, a strange liquid flowed in streams. Wrote Pliny: "and this...was the origin of glass."
A nice story, but hardly true. The most reliable research places the invention of glass sometime in the third millennium before the birth of Christ, in Mesopotamia, or present-day Iraq and Syria.
That is not to say that it is difficult to make glass on a beach, using only materials found there. L. David Pye, director of the Center for Glass Research at Alfred University, in Alfred, New York, set out to do that one day last summer, intent on following a recipe based on an ancient cuneiform text from Mesopotamia: "Take 60 parts sand, 180 parts ashes from sea plants, 5 parts chalk, heat them all together, and you will get glass."
Dr. Pye, of course, had no trouble finding sand along the Chesapeake Bay, in the Virginia Tidewater town of Cape Charles. There was seaweed for soda ash, and shells, when crushed, would provide the chalk. The mixture was cooked over a fire of driftwood at about 1600F for two hours. The result: not glass.
"Perhaps the fire was not hot enough," Pye said. He turned next to the formula of natron and sand, from the sailors' tale. When that cooking was done, there was glass on the beach. The small piece he retrieved from the fire had a blue tinge to it and was roughly textured. It was not fit for even a bauble, but it was glass.
Pye was delighted. "Even if it didn't happen exactly as Pliny described it, this shows it was possible!"
Sometimes it takes nothing more than a strike of lightning on a sand beach to create glass; it appears in the form of thin tubes called fulgurites. There are also tektites: small, rounded bodies of glass formed as a result of fiery meteorites crashing to earth. Among natural glasses, the most prevalent is obsidian. Shiny and dark, it is born in the fires of volcanoes and was first used by humans to make tools more than a million years ago.
Glass, then, in one form or another, has been long in noble service to humans. As one of the most widely used of manufactured materials, and certainly the most versatile, it can be as imposing as a telescope mirror the width of a tennis court or as small and simple as a marble zinging across dirt. It has given us tumblers for drink and bulbs for light. Glass clears the haziness of failing eyesight, and, as a mirror, it becomes a scepter for vanity (and lets us look at the hidden corners of ourselves).
And, of course, it is glass that allows visual union of the outside and the in--the glass skins of towers and the windows through which are reflected the shadows of our secluded lives.
The uses of this adaptable material have been broadened dramatically by new technologies: Glass fiber optics--more than eight million miles--carrying telephone and television signals across the nation; glass ceramics serving as the nose cones of missiles and as crowns for teeth; tiny glass beads taking radiation doses inside the body to specific organs; even a new type of glass fashioned of nuclear waste in order to dispose of that unwanted material.
"Glass has so many unique properties--its ease in shaping, its transparency, durability, and low cost--that I think it will be indispensable in the growing communications, information, and electronics industries," said William R. Prindle, a former vice president of the Technology Group at Corning Incorporated, in Corning, New York.
"For one thing, those industries require display systems for their computers and televisions, and glass--either as a picture tube or as a thin and flat sheet for a liquid crystal display--is the material of choice."
On the horizon, Dr. Prindle suggests, may be optical computers. These could store programs and process information by means of light--pulses from tiny lasers--rather than electrons. And the pulses would travel over glass fibers, not copper wire. These machines could function hundreds of times faster than today's electronic computers and hold vastly more information.
Today fiber optics are used to obtain a clearer image of smaller and smaller objects than ever before--even bacterial viruses. A new generation of optical instruments is emerging that can provide detailed imaging of the inner workings of cells. Called near-field scanning optical microscopes, they can harness what one scientist calls "the power of photons" to resolve images down to approximately one two-millionths of an inch.
It is the surge in fiber-optic use and in liquid crystal displays that has set the U.S. glass industry--a 16-billion-dollar business employing some 150,000 workers--to building new plants to meet demand. But it is not only in technology and commerce that glass has widened its horizons.
The use of glass as art, a tradition going back at least to Roman times, is also surging. In Seattle and in the mountains of western North Carolina and the countrified south of New Jersey--nearly everywhere, it seems--men and women are blowing glass and creating works of art. In recent years the movement has gained new status, taking leave of the world of craft and ascending into the galleries and slick catalogs and price-upon-request cachet.
"I didn't sell a piece of glass until 1975." Dale Chihuly was saying that, and smiling as he did, for in the 18 years since the end of the dry spell, he has become one of the most financially successful artists of the 20th century. He went on to tell me about a new commission--a glass sculpture for the headquarters building of a pizza company--for which his fee is half a million dollars.
More than anyone, Chihuly is responsible for the attention being given to the studio art-glass movement. He has had a one-man show at the Louvre, a rare achievement for an American artist, and just last year had the first show by a single artist in the new Seattle Art Museum. "They chose me rather than a painter or sculptor, so it shows there has been a crossover for glass from the crafts to the fine arts," he said.
Chihuly, a meatcutter's son from Tacoma, has a studio on a waterfront in Seattle, where he and assistants carry his designs to creation. There is no mistaking a Chihuly piece. It is usually oversize and swirling in opulence, but a work to win the heart.
The studio art-glass movement began in the 1960s under the guidance of Harvey Littleton, who now has a studio in North Carolina and is a legend among artists for whom fire is a palette. Chihuly was his student at one time. Later Chihuly and art patrons John and Anne Gould Hauberg established a place called Pilchuck, where other students could go to learn to work with glass.
Pilchuck Glass School lies 50 miles north of Seattle, in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. The view from there carries to the waters of Puget Sound. It is here that some of the greatest makers of glass art come each summer to teach. They are masters, and none more so than Lino Tagliapietra, a Venetian, of whom it is said at Pilchuck that as a glassblower, he is without equal.
"Oh, that's not true," Tagliapietra said. "If there is a difference between me and another, it may be because of the facilities and equipment I have. Also, I work with the same people, and the studio has become like a kitchen with everybody making their incredible stuff--incredible food, incredible glass."
Also at Pilchuck many summers is Jan Mares, a Czech, an engraver of glass. He does not blow glass; rather, all of his work is cold. He spends hours at the diamond and copper wheels, cutting and polishing and enfolding bold images in layers of crystal, and hoping, always hoping....
"It is your piece, and you are almost finished with it," Mares said. "Then you do a little final polishing and, you know, make the mistake. You have been with the piece for a month, two months, and then in only a second, at the very last, it can break."
When he is not at Pilchuck, Tagliapietra lives and works on the island of Murano, near Venice. He represents one of the most important traditions in glassmaking.
By the middle of the 13th century Venice was on course to become the foremost producer of glass in the world. Near the end of that century the factories were relocated to nearby Murano, as there was concern of the danger to Venice from all the fires in the furnaces. It is also true that it was easier to contain the craftsmen on the smaller island and prevent them from revealing the secrets of their work to the outside world. Such information was passed along from father to son, and, indeed, it wasn't until the early 17th century that the first book of instructions for making glass was printed in Europe.
The work of the masters on Murano astonished the world. For the most part the glass pieces were blown thin and were light and richly colored--perfect for use at a papal Mass or to hold the unguents of a contessa.
Today in Murano, the tradition continues, although not with the importance of the past. A hundred factories produce glass on the island, but much is low quality, designed for tourists. However, there are still artists of renown there. One is Alfredo Barbini.
Barbini is a man who has spent three-score years and more creating remarkable works of glass art as did his ancestors starting as far back as 1658. "I decided that I would rather work with glass than go to school, so I started when I was 13," he told me. "Two years later, when I was 15, I was regarded as a master."
Barbini is 81, and still by the furnaces on most days, a short, wiry, hard-muscled man, surrounded by the 30 workers in his studio, handling the pipe, with the heavy gob of molten glass on the end, like a youth. It is a fish that takes form in glass as I watch him work, and when it is finished and taken to the annealing oven to be cooled over three or four days, there is a respite of no more than an hour before he has started on something new.
"I have no time for anything else," he said. And so the Barbini tradition continues.
Another tradition lives on in Jamey Turner. For him, glass is not to be blown or touched by science but caressed by the hands of those with music in their hearts.
I met Turner, a pixieish man with boundless enthusiasm for just about everything, in the classroom of an elementary school in Fairfax, Virginia. He was there to play for the students, to rub his fingers over the rims of glasses until such offerings as "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony rang through the room in tones more sweet and pure than those of the ocarina.
The instrument is called a glass harp, and there's no one in the world who plays it as well as Jamey Turner. He may use as many as 60 glasses of all sizes, each holding an exact amount of water (the more water, the lower the pitch). His performances in schools are more popular than recess, and there are other times when he performs with symphony orchestras, always astonishing the audience with the music to be drawn from glass.
There have been satellite recordings of "sounds" coming from the planet Jupiter, and, eerily, they are similar to those of the glass harp. I suggested to Turner that maybe there is another, far away, who shares his talent with the instrument. "Oh yes, oh yes, I hope so," he replied before reaching for the distilled water he uses to tune his instrument.
For makers of fine crystal, such as Waterford of Ireland, Orrefors of Sweden, and Corning's Steuben, light is the music of glass--the dance of it through a chandelier, for example, or the soft sparkle of colors in and about a bowl.
It used to be something of an article of faith that a family have at least one nice piece of crystal in the china closet. Remember? It wasn't cheap, but not painfully expensive either, and it had a good feel to it, heavy--at least a 24 percent lead content--but sensual. The lead causes light rays to further refract, or bend, separating out colors such as red and green and causing the glass to sparkle.
But the demand for high-quality, handblown crystal has dropped in recent years. In part, this is a matter of fashion and popular taste--but more recently the market has been hammered by world recession and the decline of the U.S. dollar.
"When the dollar is strong, business is terrific," said Redmond O'Donoghue, sales and marketing director of Waterford Crystal. "But when it weakens, we have problems." And so, alas, the famed company, with more than 60 percent of its sales in the United States, is struggling.
Now, in addition to all else, Waterford is working to combat fears of possible health dangers from lead in glasses and decanters.
"Our studies show that one would be more likely to die of alcohol poisoning from the contents than from the lead in the decanter or glass itself," one Waterford official told me. Nevertheless, the company now applies a polymer coating to the inside of decanters, bringing the level of lead on the surface down to almost undetectable levels.
The company is also marketing a line of less expensive crystal, made not in Ireland but in Germany and Slovenia. Still, Waterford is too much of a giant in the world of quality crystal to give up that market.
The plant in the south of Ireland is heavy with the romance of the time when a piece of Waterford was a necessary luxury. Each work produced there continues to be handmade, each fractionally different. And the great engravers are still there, men like Eamonn Hartley, who can put the face of Noah on a piece of crystal and give it all the authority of a biblical injunction.
Another Waterford worker is Tom Jacques, a quiet man with an easy smile. His job is to take the pieces off the belt as they come out of the annealing oven and examine them for flaws. An imperfection, no matter how small, is cause for breakage, and so Tom Jacques spends a good part of his day smashing Waterford crystal. He looked at me and quickly sensed what I was thinking.
"Like to have a go at it?"
The bowl he handed me had a bubble, or "seed," in it; otherwise it would have been priced in a store at $200. And now it was mine to destroy, to hurl and shatter, and I could laugh depravedly while doing it if I chose. It carried into the side of the metal bin with force enough to set up a good noise, part explosion and part crunch, followed by a rain of joyful, and most satisfying, tinkling.
Not all the glass technology that touches our lives is ultramodern. Consider the lowly lightbulb; 1.8 billion are manufactured each year in the United States, and the machine that makes them is surprisingly aged--it creaks and groans--but has not yet been surpassed. It stands, you might say, as a paradigm for those of us of a certain age.
At the turn of the century most lightbulbs were handblown, and the cost of one was equivalent to half a day's pay for the average worker. In effect, the invention of the ribbon machine by Corning in the 1920s lighted this nation. The price of a bulb plunged, and the pale yellow light of those early filaments flickered in households from coast to coast. Small wonder that the machine has been called one of the great mechanical achievements of all time.
And yet it is invested with nothing so much as wondrous simplicity: A narrow ribbon of molten glass travels over a moving belt of steel in which there are holes. The glass sags through the holes and into waiting molds. Puffs of compressed air then shape the glass. So it is that the envelope of a lightbulb is made by a single machine at the rate of 66,000 an hour, as compared with 1,200 a day produced by a team of four glassblowers.
The ribbon machine is not without its drawbacks. "For every 10,000 pounds of molten glass that goes into the machine, only 3,500 is used," said Jeffrey Hoffman, operations manager at Osram Sylvania in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania. The rest, called cullet, is recycled back into the furnace.
Corning no longer makes bulbs for general use, but its ribbon machines live on at the Wellsboro plant, which it sold some years ago. This is where it all began, and where it continues--all the clanking, clunking, and hissing of that amazing invention, and all the tens of thousands of paper-thin bulbs (twenty-thousandths of an inch) tumbling onto the conveyor belt.
And watching it all, you might want to applaud the breakage rate of only between 3 and 4 percent. Or you might wonder, as I did, that 7,000 bulbs can be packed naked in a single wooden carton with no protection but a light coating of lubricant on each bulb.
The secret of glass's versatility lies in its interior structure. Although it is rigid--and thus like a solid--the atoms are arranged in a random, disordered fashion--characteristic of a liquid. In the melting process, the atoms in the raw materials are disturbed from their normal position in the molecular structure; before they can find their way back to crystalline arrangements, the glass cools.
This looseness in molecular structure gives the material what engineers call tremendous "formability" and capacity for dissolving. "You can cast a huge mirror or draw out glass as a fiber," said Dr. Prindle, the retired Corning technology expert. "And you can dissolve almost anything in it, and in great quantities. The ability to accommodate allows technicians to tailor glass to the need.
"To make a brilliant, sparkling glass, add lead oxide or barium oxide to the basic sand-soda-lime mixture; for a heat-resistant glass, throw in boric oxide; for green sunglasses, add chromium and copper."
Scientists continue to experiment with new mixtures. Corning manufactures 750 different glasses and glass-related products, keeps hundreds of thousands of glass formulas on record, and each week evaluates hundreds more. There, men and women sit in small rooms facing large computers and electron microscopes and other exotic instruments, all probing the elusive atoms.
"We can now understand glass better," said Michael Teter, a research fellow in engineering at Corning. "What has always been missing is a full knowledge of what goes on at the molecular level. Less than one in ten projects involving new uses for glass succeeds. Now at least we have a chance of knowing why things go wrong."
Mike Davies is a London architect, a member of Richard Rogers Partnership, designers of the new Lloyd's of London building. In that edifice Davies and his colleagues had opportunities to test their imaginations with applications of special glasses. The core of the building is a glass atrium, whose 16-story facade is fashioned of 14,350 square yards of glass. Into that glass were rolled thousands of prisms, to forge diamonds out of the sunlight and add sparkle to that towering house of indemnities.
But Mike Davies sees even more dramatic buildings, using molecular chemistry. "Glass is the great building material of the future, the `dynamic skin,'" he said. "Think of glass that has been treated to react to electric currents going through it, glass that will change from clear to opaque at the push of a button. That gives you instant curtains. Think of how the tall buildings in New York could perform a symphony of colors as the glass in them is made to change colors instantly."
Glass as instant curtains is available now, but the cost is exorbitant. As for the glass changing colors instantly, that may come--but engineers are not yet prepared to transform, say, the John Hancock Tower in Boston into a pillar of green for St. Patrick's Day.
Companies do offer a range of windows designed to conserve energy. There are reflective coatings and other elements in glass to control the amount of sunlight and heat coming into a room. Mike Davies' vision may indeed be on the way to fulfillment.
There are many families of glass, among them glass ceramics. They are made stronger than ordinary glass by heating special glass compositions to form patterns of orderly molecules. There is one called Macor, developed by Corning, and it is strong enough to be worked on a lathe, to have nuts and bolts fashioned of it, and to serve as window frames in the space shuttle.
There is another, Dicor, also by Corning, used to make dental crowns with an aesthetic effect never before achieved. It is stronger than dental porcelain, plaque resistant, and highly translucent.
Glass fiber optics grew from a challenge laid down in 1966; make a glass pure enough to allow at least one percent of a light pulse to travel one kilometer (.62 mile) through it. At the time, the best fibers could carry the light only 30 feet.
The answer was found in extremely pure, flexible, coated glass fibers. Today the pulses can be transmitted more than 75 miles before requiring a repeater device. Fiber-optic systems--using lasers no larger than a grain of sand--can transmit 32,000 times as much information as the equivalent amount of copper wire. United States, Japanese, and Middle Eastern investors are now planning a one-billion-dollar project--the world's longest undersea fiber-optic cable, stretching from the United Kingdom to Japan via the Indian Ocean. Five fiber-optic cables already link Europe and the U.S. Another three connect the West Coast with Japan.
Fiber-optic technology has proved a boon to surgeons and patients too: The thin and flexible devices are inserted into the body to give doctors living pictures of internal organs.
Glass also helps victims of liver tumors. Beads one-third the thickness of a human hair carry radiation directly to the tumor. According to co-inventor Delbert E. Day of the University of Missouri-Rolla, the radiation is delivered in glass microspheres; these are injected through a catheter into the artery that supplies blood to the liver.
"In this way," said Dr. Day, "the radiation can be concentrated in the area of the tumor and deliver four or five times the amount provided by routine methods." The beads usually lose all radioactivity in two or three weeks, after which they remain in the liver forever. The procedure is now used in Canada.
Much research focuses on finding methods of making glass almost totally resistant to heat and expansion. Would it be possible to make an automobile engine out of such glass? As it would conduct little or no heat, the need for a coolant might be eliminated. I put the question to Dieter Krause, chief of research for Schott Glaswerke of Germany. He seemed taken aback.
"I can't imagine that," he replied. "However, new highly porous glasses are being developed, and under proper management, they could be used as a filter material in some engines."
Schott's main plant, in Mainz near Frankfurt, pushes down to the Rhine River; from it have come major advances in glass. More than a century ago Otto Schott was one of the first to vary density and refraction in glass by adding ingredients such as barium and phosphoric and boric acids. The company went on to develop many optical and specialty glasses. Today it makes not only bottles for a baby's formula but also windows of radiation-shielding glass, weighing as much as two tons each, for use in nuclear research.
Of all the optical pieces made by Schott, none match in size the one now being prepared by the company for the European Southern Observatory, a consortium of eight European Community nations. It is the first of four mirrors for what will be the world's largest optical telescope. When finished, the instrument will be placed atop 8,740-foot-high Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert of Chile, a site where most nights are awash in brilliant clarity.
Each mirror, made of a glass ceramic called Zerodur, will be nearly 27 feet in diameter and weigh 24 tons. It has been said that this will be the most stupendous work in glass ever done.
"Ever done, yes," agreed Alfred Jacobsen, a Schott official and an expert on optical glass. "But you must understand that it is very difficult to handle such a large piece, and it must be transported a long way."
"Are you afraid it's going to...?" (It is difficult to speak of breakage to those who are in glass for a living.)
"There is concern," Mr. Jacobsen replied, going on to point out that while the mirror would cover the floor space of a double garage, it will be less than seven inches thick. Such a monumental production is itself a challenge. After the piece has cooled from its 2200F pouring temperature to a more manageable 1500F, it is moved to an annealing oven where it will remain for four months, until it cools to room temperature. Perhaps the most heart-stopping moment in the process occurs when the mirror is removed from the mold. The workers are silent in concentration and hardly notice that the temperature in the room has reached 120F. A 70-ton crane has moved into position above the mold, and from it drop lines attached to vacuum cups. And so the mirror is held there like a hovering, massive spaceship while the mold is dismantled.
In the end, after 23 months, the mirror will be 70 percent crystalline and completed. It will travel by ship to Paris, where French technicians will polish it, then voyage to Chile. Finally, it will go up the mountain in a specially made vehicle with 16 axles. The first one of the four is expected to be ready in 1995.
There has been a sense of mission in the casting hall at Mainz. It seems as if the workers share an awareness that when the four mirrors are in place, arranged on the mountaintop and programmed to function separately or together as one telescope, astronomers will be able to study distant objects in more detail than ever before.
As glass can reach out to the stars, it can also carry our nightmares deep into the earth. In the piney woods of South Carolina, technicians are preparing to make glass with radioactive wastes. This glass will be jacketed in steel and hidden away forever--one answer to the dilemma of what to do with dreaded nuclear refuse.
The ability of the basic ingredients of glass to dissolve almost anything, and in large quantities, makes the procedure possible. And because glass retains its physical and chemical characteristics almost like volcanic rock, a block of the hazardous nuclear-waste glass can be encapsulated in a stainless-steel canister and buried in the ground without fear of leakage. This method has already been put to use in France, Belgium, and the United Kingdom.
In the U.S., plans are moving ahead to vitrify some of the 34 million gallons of highly radioactive wastes at the massive--300 square miles--Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Plutonium 239 and tritium have been produced there for use in atomic weapons since the 1950s, the height of the Cold War. The site holds five heavy-water reactors.
Of the 34 million gallons of waste, 3.4 million emit high-level radiation, mainly from cesium and strontium isotopes. This deadly muck now has the consistency of peanut butter. A building in which to vitrify the material has been constructed, using 69,000 cubic yards of concrete and 13,000 tons of steel. The facility will be fully automated, for this truly will be a glass to see through not only darkly but at a distance.
The radioactive material will be mixed with fine particles of borosilicate glass and fed into a melter where it will cook at a temperature of 2100F. And then, destined to harden into shiny black glass, it will be poured into steel canisters for burial, possibly in a mountain in Nevada.
Test runs of the equipment began in 1990 and are expected to continue into 1994, when the actual melting will start. To process the current inventory of high-level waste will require more than 15 years.
I drove away from the Savannah River Site and headed north, to the place in Tidewater Virginia where I was born. There is a church there with a stained-glass window whose memory has stayed with me through all my life.
Of all the kinds of glass art, none is more widespread and enduring than stained glass. It is found not only in great cathedrals but also on the doors of shower stalls and as the shades for night-lights. It has also become an important architectural material, incorporating the glorious union of sunlight and colored glass.
The Abbe Suger, who in the 12th century rebuilt the church of Saint-Denis outside Paris, was among the first to recognize the ability of glass to brighten mood and perception, to allow us to move outside our physical world, "urging us onward from the material to the immaterial."
The process for making stained-glass pieces has remained much the same for centuries. Color is brought to the glass by adding different metallic oxides to the basic mixture of sand, soda, and lime. Amber, for example, is created by adding silver; an exquisite gold-pink glass contains real gold. Pieces of the colored glasses are cut to fit a pattern--say, a life-size depiction of the Venerable Bede for a church window--and then are joined with the use of lead cames, or rods, soldered together. The process demands not only the vision of art but also technical expertise--craftsmanship. Stained glass made in this traditional way is expensive, as much as a thousand dollars a square foot.
After blossoming in medieval times, stained glass declined in popularity, then came back to prominence in the late 19th century. Great artists such as Matisse, Chagall, and Braque worked with the material, but it was an American, born in 1848, whose name for me came to stand for masterworks in stained glass. He was Louis Comfort Tiffany. His windows, lamps, and other pieces glow with translucent colors, and they stand among the greatest glassworks ever produced.
The window in my childhood church is of the opalescent blue of a Tiffany work, but it isn't one. I had come back to the church with an awareness that there is a lot of bad stained glass upon the land today, glass to inspire nothing other than disdain for poor quality.
But when stained glass is well-done, when light plays on the piece in a way to draw reverence from the soul, then that is cause to sit and wonder and think. I thought of a now deceased colleague of mine on this magazine.
He once wrote of Chartres Cathedral and its magnificent windows, referring to the medieval French church as "a vast prayer in glass...." In the church of my childhood, there is nothing to compare with that, but I think my friend would agree that this stained glass before me now is, at the least, a moment of grace.
Copyright 1993 National Geographic Society. All Rights Reserved.
