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Glass Discussion & Research. NO IDENTIFICATION REQUESTS here please. => British & Irish Glass => Topic started by: neilh on July 08, 2010, 03:27:52 PM
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Hi folks,
The Manchester Art Gallery have put up a couple of fascinating images of Molineaux Webb glassware. Two glass balls, one of which has a company label on it. They date to 1888 but what are they?
http://www.manchestergalleries.org/the-collections/search-the-collection/display.php?EMUSESSID=2ee1bdcc630f453644cd314cff39d293&irn=65282
http://www.manchestergalleries.org/the-collections/search-the-collection/display.php?EMUSESSID=2ee1bdcc630f453644cd314cff39d293&irn=65281
They had a letter with them, not shown on the site, but it reads as follows:
The nominal size of the Ball in the paper is 2.5472 inches diameter. The difference between the largest and smallest diameter detected is 0.00187 inches
The only other clue is the name J Griffiths on the letter. I am wondering if this could be related to Birmingham lamp makers Eli Griffiths & Sons, but I don't know if they were active then.
Any idea what they are?
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Neil, I did wonder if they were sun globes but they seem smaller than those noted elsewhere (4" diameter") http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell-Stokes_recorder and they didn't have the glass block base... so another thought was some type of illuminator, like a pavement light with an extra globe to help disseminate the light below..? I wonder if Ian Macky may know... http://glassian.org/index.html Failing that, possibly a small crystal ball for use by a fortune teller, or even a plain and simple paperweight perhaps...?
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Can't say for sure-- this doesn't look like anything related to my fields-- but here are a couple possibilities:
1. Wasn't Griffiths a lamp maker? Molineaux Webb made lenses for lamps and such too, right? Perhaps the spheres were part of a fancy lamp, and just meant to be illuminated and look nice? A sphere is not a very useful lens, so seems doubtful it's part of anything truly optical.
2. In "On the Resistance of Glass Globes and Cylinders to Collapse from External Pressure; and on the Tensile and Compressive Strength of Various Kinds of Glass (http://www.jstor.org/pss/108698)", by W. Fairbairn and Thomas Tate, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 149, (1859), pp. 213-247, it looks like the flint glass samples were provided by M. W. & Co. Could it be one of these?
--ian
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There was another name on this letter, "McGregor". I think this relates to Agnes McGregor, the wife of Thomas George Webb. Her father, Daniel McGregor, was an industrialist who made his fortune from cotton/calico. So I am wondering if the ball has some arcane use in the cotton industry and the base is simply to rest the ball on, when it is not doing... whatever it is doing...
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other known producers of crystal balls around the same time are Val St.Lambert and Baccarat. No other use but fortune telling is known for these....
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Can't see a cotton industry use for them. (I spent two years reading textile industry documents)
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Sun Sphere is the likeliest answer - see this 1944 advert by Chance Bros. The size is quoted at 4-in and I do have an article stored somewhere amongst the gigabytes of CB data where they are discussed. They was used to measure the strength of the sun at any given time, I think by recording a mark on special paper. The stronger the sun, the darker/larger the mark.
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Neil's examples are only 2½" across though David.
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Size probably doesn't mater in this case.
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It certainly has to be an industrial or more likely scientific use as the letter with the balls mentions precision down to a tiny fraction of an inch. I like the sun sphere idea!
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The biggest problem with them being balls from the Campbell-Stokes type sunshine recorders is the size, as the smaller the ball the smaller the card the data is burned onto, so I would think it calls into question the accuracy of any readings if they are too small.
I've found the specs from versions still being made and that gives the size of the sphere as 101.6mm (i.e. exactly 4") diameter, the same as the ones in David's Chance advert, and those offered for sale today say they are made to a British Meteorological Office specification (so in this instance I think size does matter Christine :24: :))
However, searching through the Science Museum online stuff I found a page here: http://www.ingenious.org.uk/media/4.0_SAC/webimages/1031/1/10311940_3.jpg which shows a variety of instruments from an exhibition in 1885, one of which might have a smaller ball: see image, second item from left top row. Sadly the writing is too fuzzy to read the caption underneath this item.
It might be worth Neil contacting the NMSI and asking if they have a higher resolution copy of this image and what that second item is... and it'd be also worth asking the Manchester Art Gallery if their balls are attached to those stands or if they are separate.
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Having just revisited this topic, as there were so many different sizes, going down to 'powder' (almost), then they could have been what became known as Ballotini beads. These had a wide range of uses, such as a coating for reflective road signs, cinema screens, and the largest known were used for storing blood plasma - not sure what size these were, but I imagine the idea was to prevent coagulation.
Sizes quoted on the original patent of 1943 (US2334578, R H Potters) were 0.008-in to 0.055-in*. However, all this is superfluous as it post-dates the Molineaux Webb spheres, unless MW never patented their idea?
*In Monopoly money that's 0.2032 to 1.397mm