Lost y’er Marbles
Growing up the school playground was often filled with school children intent on claiming their competitors best, biggest and most handsome. The competition was fierce to say the least! I often favoured strategy over boy brute force because in the end strategy often won me their best, biggest and most handsome. We all went to the wall when it came to playing and winning a formidable game of marbles.
“A marble is a small spherical toy usually made from glass, clay, or agate. These balls vary in size. Most commonly, they are about ½ inch (1.25 cm) across but they may range from less than ¼ inch (0.635 cm) to over 3 inches (7.75 cm), while some art glass marbles for display purposes are over 12 inches (30 cm) wide.
Marbles are made using many techniques, though they can generally be categorised into two types: hand-made and machine-made. Marbles were originally made by hand. Stone or ivory marbles were fashioned by grinding. Clay, pottery, ceramic, or porcelain marbles were made by rolling the material into a ball, letting them dry or by firing and then could be left natural, painted, or glazed.
Clay marbles also known as crock marbles or commies (common), were made of slightly porous clay, traditionally from local clay or leftover earthenware (‘crockery’) rolled into balls then glazed and fired at low heat creating an opaque imperfect sphere that was frequently sold as the poor boy’s ‘old timey’ marble. Glass marbles however were fashioned through the production of glass rods that were stacked together to form the desired pattern, cutting the rod into marble-sized pieces using marble scissors, and rounding the still-malleable glass.
The machine was an improvement on shaping marbles entirely by hand over a heatsource. James Leighton’s work provided an intermediary step in mechanisation in 1891. He patented a tool resembling tongs with a spherical mold on its end, based on an earlier German toymaker’s method. While not automated in any way, the process sped up production.
The earliest marbles were rolled out of clay and therefore did not offer any technological insight for glass marble makers. In fact, it was a man with a background in metal ball-bearings who was able to contrive a machine to shape marbles. The earliest marbles were rolled out of clay, and therefore did not offer any technological insight for glass marble makers. In 1902, Martin Christensen, patented his invention of belts and rotating wheels as the first automatic marble maker.
The globs of heated glass were individually melted off the end of cylindrical canes by hand and placed in the machine, so only part of the process was automated. These marbles didn’t have pontils, the nubs left over from where the rod was severed from the glob, so they rolled straighter in the game of marbles.
One mechanical technique was to drop globules of molten glass into a groove made by two interlocking parallel screws. As the screws rotate, the marble travels along them, gradually being shaped into a sphere as it cools. Color was added to the main batch glass and/or to additional glass streams that are combined with the main stream in a variety of ways. For example, in the “cat’s-eye” style, colored glass vanes are injected into a transparent main stream. Applying more expensive colored glass to the surface of cheaper transparent or white glass is also a common technique.
Increasing demand during the 1920s and 30s could be successfully met by mechanised marble companies. Children and adults alike were caught up in the marble craze, collecting fancy “shooters” and entering tournaments. The game of marbles relies on flicking marbles at other players’ marbles within a boundary, in order to take them out of play.
In modern machines, glass is melted in a furnace around 1500 degrees Fahrenheit (815 degrees Celsius). Once the glass is freely flowing, it streams down a slide nicknamed the Gobfeeder into the grooved mechanism. Swaths of colored glass can be added at this point. Each wheel’s edge has a semicircular groove, and when matched up with another, the space between them is a sphere, just like Christenson’s. The hot, bright orange gobs of glass are separated and rolled while they are malleable. When they have been rolled into perfect spheres and cooled sufficiently to maintain their shape, the machine pushes them out to a bin to be packaged and sold.
Marbles back in my childhood days were your usual suspects: mollybusters, the large glass marble almost a similar size to the gobstopper lolly, the totally ferocious ball bearing which you only ever played against if you had one too! Americans so called because of their red,white and blue colouring, peewees the smallest and kindest marble of them all, cats eyes so many. These days marbles aren’t just a play thing they can also be an amazing work of art. One of my favourite glass artists is Anakin.
Anakin has been working with glass since January of 2001 when he witnessed a 15 minute bead making demonstration. After 3 years of bead making, Anakin experimented occasionally with marble making using soft glass but found it to be frustrating. Working with borosilicate glass was always a goal. Over the years, sales of glass beads and jewellery financed Anakin’s equipment upgrades and improved his glass working capabilities. He now spends most of his torch time working with borosilicate glass.
Continued experimentation and never ending questioning of marble making techniques leads Anakin to continually develop new designs and styles. Anakin is the consummate perfectionist and strives for technical excellence in each piece. Symmetry and balance are key design elements in Anakin’s marbles.” Anakin has a fabulous tutorial that’s worth viewing, you’ll find it in his website www.anakinsglasseye.com/tutorial-implosion2. For copyright reasons I can only direct you to it but I have to tell you this is one artist that definitely hasn’t lost his marbles.
