Glass-making is an ancient craft and tradition, the results of which have culminated in glass lamp shades seen in many homes today. The first signs of their popularity emerged during the Industrial Revolution, when utility lighting in homes became wide-spread. One of the main figures of this movement was Louis Comfort Tiffany, who transformed glass lamp shades from an esoteric art form to a kind of high-end house-hold furnishing at the start of the 20th century.
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 light bulbs only came in the last one hundred and fifty years.
The main constituents of glass are silicon and oxygen, which combine to form a completely disordered atomic structure. In contrast, crystals are regular layouts of atoms. These properties make glass extremely hard, but brittle at the same time. It also has the appearance of being a very slow flowing liquid, but the rate of flow is on the order of millions of years rather than decades. This facts poke holes in the oft-cited explanation that church windows are thicker at the bottom edge because the glass continues to flow.
Artisans take advantage of the malleable molten state to wring out an infinite number of shapes. For example, a glass maker takes a hollow metal rod known as a blow pipe to pick up raw glass, by alternately rolling and inflating it with his breath, the artisan can fashion a bulbous shape from something initially without form. It’s easy to make small objects like vases and cups, but takes real skill and patience to craft a large, elaborate 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.
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