subject: Introduction to Vintage Glass Light Shades [print this page] Introduction to Vintage Glass Light Shades
Glass-workers belong to an old tradition and discipline. Their handiwork has evolved into the glass lamp shades found as objects of indoor decoration in many houses today. The infiltration of these objects accelerated in the times of the Industrial Revolution, precisely when gas-fired and electric illumination was embedded into city grids. One towering figure was Louis Comfort Tiffany, famed for almost singlehandedly fashioning the industry of glass lamp shades.
The lamp shades are available in a dizzying array of shapes and designs. Large-scale production methods means artisan teams no longer slave to produce a trickle of products. Instead, popular and hot-selling designs can be issued at breakneck pace to reach many more homes.
The high malleability of glass is derived from the fact that glass becomes soft and flowing at high temperatures. In turn this leads to many stylistic possibilities. Controlling and shaping the glass is a profession dating back thousands of years. A large fraction of products from this profession was in items like glasses, lanterns and containers. The need to cover lightbulbs only came in the last one hundred and fifty years.
The molecular structure of glass is a blend of silicon and oxygen. In contrast to other materials, glass has no regularity in its crystal lattice. In fact, it's molecular structure is completely disordered, giving rise to a new class of substances which are, unsurprisingly, named "glasses". Some people point out that it's perpeptually a liquid because of evidence that it continues to flow, seen in old church windows that are thicker at the bottom than the top. However, this is likely to be an incorrect interpretation of observations as the flowing probably occurred most when the window was initially cast.
A craftsman of glass uses its soft, fluid-like properties at high temperatures to bend it to new shapes. He uses a hollow rod made of metal, called a blow pipe, to pick up the molten mass. By rolling it at once, and blowing into the mass, he can create a symmetrical, cylindrical shape that slowly becomes a glass lamp shade.
The artisan can improve upon his product further by adding finer details such as curling the edge of coloring the surface. Louis Comfort Tiffany pioneered the stained glass lamp shades by combining colored glass with iron rods. He drew inspiration from his past work in stained glass art. To color the glass, he added iron oxide impurities, and generated shapes of natural scenes or creatures with iron.
