Hi, thank you for taking an interest
I will take your suggestion and investigate it further. It's always really helpful to have a different perspective so thank you!
I think the key is that these completely hollow double walled pieces were not easy to make. CH British Glass 1800-1914 demonstrates this on pages 269-272 where they completed a project with Malcolm Andrews assisted by Pat Ricketts making a piece in modern clear glass. It took twenty minutes and the glass had to be reheated twenty times to complete the piece. And that was without it being in cased coloured glass. Something that was even more difficult due to the annealing process and compatibility of coloured glass. CH says this would have added to the difficulty and increased the making time.
I'm aware I'm just putting out on here all my random thoughts on this glass but I feel sure the goblets/vases weren't made at Whitefriars James Powell & Son. (CH also mentions in the same book pp 271 that there was no conclusive proof they were made at Whitefriars James Powell & Sons).
Yes an inkwell I believe was made there from the readings of the court case (which seemed to take ages to actually procure, iirc from reading the court case, for some reason. Maybe they couldn't make the hollow double walled piece, or perhaps they just didn't have time to experiment or perhaps they were just not interested in supplying a small demand client? I don't know why it took so long but clearly it wasn't an easy piece to get hold of from what was said in the court case).
But I suspect the goblets and smaller goblet shape salts etc were made somewhere else.
And I think the discussion of the quality/weight is a red herring.
As a case in point I am attaching a photograph of two Bohemian glass goblets of a very similar shape. Admittedly one is larger than the other - I have no idea how to measure how much larger but perhaps saying a third would be generous.
The one on the left is double walled silvered glass,with a gold interior and has been engraved with birds and vines. Probably dates to second half of the 19th somewhere.
It weighs just around 120grms
The blue and white goblet also made in Bohemia, probably around mid 19th century so a similar time period to when the Varnish/Thomson plugged vases and goblets were made, is triple overlay, blue over white over clear.
If the suggestion that Bohemian glass was lighter than English glass as a determiner was right, then being generously a third larger should mean it should weigh around 160 grms.
Even allowing for it being cased and doubling the weight of the silvered goblet, that would make it 240gms.
It actually weighs over twice that weight at just over 1/2 kg, nearly 1 1/4lb (my scales are not electronic so I'm being cautious).
So I think it's a misnomer that Bohemian glass is noticeably lighter and that that factor could be a determinant of where the Varnish plugged/Thomson plugged glass was made.
Yes, I do think that later silvered Bohemian pieces may have been made of a different kind of glass, making them much lighter.
But that does not preclude the double walled goblets from c.1850 being made of a heavier type of glass at a different factory in Bohemia.
Another example is this green vase with a Varnish plug, article from 2017:
The owner actually mentions in the article that it was not very heavy (though each person's version of what they think will be heavy varies of course but the owner commented on that specifically)
https://random-treasure.com/2017/06/15/guess-the-date/https://i0.wp.com/random-treasure.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/mercury-glass-vase-1.jpg?resize=407%2C530&ssl=1'Only one object stood out – but solely because of its extreme blinginess and total vulgarity. A trumpet-mouthed vase with a knop stem, about 9 inches tall, in the brightest, shiniest, most luminous lime-green that you’ve ever seen in your life. Plastic? I picked it up. No, it was cold to the touch. Must be glass. It was thick-walled and fat, but not sufficiently heavy to be solid glass. Got it! It must be a vacuum flask-type construction like the liner inside the old-fashioned Thermos flasks that we used to take on picnics to keep the soup hot. I didn’t know they made vases like that, and I didn’t know they made them in any other colour than bright silver, but it couldn’t really be anything else.
For confirmation, I picked it up and looked at its underside. Sure enough, it must be double-walled. In the centre of the base was a small circular metal plate, apparently inserted in the glass to seal the vacuum. On the plate was impressed the words E VARNISH & Co PATENT LONDON. Meant nothing to me. '
Topic: E.Varnish mercury glass with embossed seal, circa 1849 (Read 84663 times)
