Corning Museum of Glass

A tall, narrow container for spoons. Spoon holders were used at the table from the mid-19th century to World War I.

A small pitcher for serving cream.

(1) A rounded, hollow vessel; (2) the uppermost part of a goblet, tazza, or wineglass.

An iron or steel tube, usually four to five feet long, for blowing glass. Blowpipes have a mouthpiece at one end and are usually fitted at the other end with a metal ring that helps to retain the gather.

An enclosed structure for the production and application of heat. In glassmaking, furnaces are used for melting the batch, maintaining pots of glass in a molten state, and reheating partly formed objects at the glory hole.

A large receptacle constructed in a furnace for melting batch. Tanks, which were first used in antiquity, replaced pots in larger glass factories in the 19th century.

The mixture of raw materials (often silica, soda or potash, and lime) that is melted in a pot or tank to make glass. Cullet, as well as minor ingredients such as colorants, can be added to the batch to help the melting process.

A fire-clay container in which batch is fused and kept molten. The glassworker gathers glass directly from the pot.

A vessel for serving sweetmeats, sweet food such as preserved or candied fruit and sugared cakes or nuts.

(from Italian, “cup”) An ornamental dish or cup on a stemmed foot. Tazzas were generally made for drinking, for displaying fruit or sweetmeats, and as purely decorative objects.

A pocket of gas trapped in glass during manufacture. The term is used both for bubbles introduced intentionally (known as air traps or beads) and for unwanted bubbles created during the melting process. Very small bubbles are known as seeds.

The narrow part of a goblet or tazza that separates the bowl and the foot.

A surface decorated with many small, adjoining pieces of varicolored materials, such as stone or glass.

A tool made from a block of wood hollowed out to form a hemispherical recess. After it has been dipped in water to reduce charring and to create a “cushion” of steam, the block is used to form the gather into a sphere before it is inflated.

A strand of glass, roughly circular in section, drawn out from a gather.

A device for holding a drawn curtain back from the window. Some 19th- and 20th-century tiebacks have glass pommels or bosses.

A process of decorating the surface of glass by the grinding action of a wheel, using disks of various sizes and materials (usually copper, but sometimes stone), and an abrasive in a grease or slurry applied to a wheel, as the engraver holds the object against the underside of the rotating wheel. See also Cutting and Copper-wheel engraving.

(from Italian, “engraving”) A method of wheel engraving whereby the ornamentation is cut into the object and lies below the surface plane. The German name for this technique is Tiefschnitt.

The process of cutting into the surface of an annealed glass object either by holding it against a rotating copper wheel fed with an abrasive or by scratching it, usually with a diamond.

The technique whereby glass is removed from the surface of an object by grinding it with rotating wheels made of stone, wood, and cork. The first stage of the process employs a stone wheel under a continuous stream of water. Later, wheels of fine-grained stone and wood, fed with various abrasives, are used to grind and polish the surface.

Glassware formed by placing a blob of molten glass in a metal mold and pressing it with a metal plunger or “follower” to form the inside shape. The resultant piece, termed “mold-pressed,” has an interior form independent of the exterior, in contrast to mold-blown glass, whose interior corresponds to the outer form. The process of pressing glass was first mechanized in the United States between 1820 and 1830.

A bottle for perfume or toilet water. Ancient Roman toilet bottles are frequently known as unguentaria.

(from Latin), pl. unguentaria. A term commonly applied to ancient Roman toilet bottles. It appears, however, that the term was “invented” in the 19th century, on analogy with unguentarius (perfume seller) and similar Latin words that the Romans used in connection with perfumes.

A long, thin rod used to gather molten glass.

A glassworker’s tool in the form of a square wooden paddle with a handle. Battledores are used to smooth the bottoms of vessels and other objects.

(Noun) A mass of molten glass (sometimes called a gob) collected on the end of a blowpipe, pontil, or gathering iron; (verb) to collect molten glass on the end of a tool.

A tool used for decorating objects by giving them a crimped or wavy edge.

A tool consisting of two rectangular pieces of wood joined at one end by a leather hinge. There is an aperture in one of the pieces of wood, and this holds the stem of a goblet or wineglass while it is being made. The clapper is used to squeeze a blob of glass in order to form the foot.

A glassworker’s tool used for decorating objects by pinching the glass while it is hot.

A tool used to trim excess hot glass from an object in the course of production. Many modern shears are embedded with chips of industrial diamonds.

The pontil, or punty, is a solid metal rod that is usually tipped with a wad of hot glass, then applied to the base of a vessel to hold it during manufacture. It often leaves an irregular or ring-shaped scar on the base when removed. This is called the “pontil mark.”

A glassworker’s tool made of wood in the shape of a cone and with a handle. It is used to form the lip at the mouth of a vessel.

A glassworker’s tool consisting of a square piece of wood or metal and a handle. It is used to flatten the bases of vessels.

A tool with two metal arms joined at one end by a spring. The distance between the arms is controlled by the glassworker, who uses jacks for a variety of purposes while shaping the parison (for example, to form the mouths of open vessels). This tool is also known as a borsella or pucellas.

Any instrument used by glassworkers to develop and shape an object. Glassworkers’ tools include the blowpipe, pontil, gathering iron, jacks, shears, clapper, pallet, block, pincers, battledore, lipper, and crimper.

Glass that is colored by (1) impurities in the basic ingredients in the batch or (2) techniques of coloring glass by one of three main processes: (a) using a dissolved metallic oxide to impart a color throughout, (b) forming a dispersion of some substance in a colloidal state, and (c) suspending particles of pigments to form opaque colors.

A type of decoration in the stems of 18th-century and later drinking glasses, made by twisting a glass rod embedded with threads of white glass, threads of colored glass, columns of air (air twists), or a combination of all three.

A monochrome segment of glass cut from a trail.