blowing it into shape.

Glass is blown by three methods: hand-blowing, semi-automatic blowing,
and automatic blowing. The first used was the hand method, and tho the
introduction of machines is rapidly making the old way a back number,
there are still factories where the old-time glass blower reigns
supreme.

One of the great centers of the bottle industry in the United States is
down in the southern end of New Jersey. Good sand is dug there--New
Jersey was part of the bed of the Atlantic before it literally rose to
its present state status--and naturally the factories cluster about the
source of supply of material. Within a radius of thirty miles the
investigator may see bottles turned out by all three methods.

The hand-blowing, while it is the slowest and most expensive means of
making bottles, is by far the most picturesque. Imagine a long, low,
dark building--dark as far as daylight is concerned, but weirdly lit by
orange and scarlet flashes from the great furnaces that crouch in its
shelter. At the front of each of these squatting monsters, men,
silhouetted against the fierce glow from the doors, move about like
puppets on wires--any noise they may make is drowned in the mastering
roar of the fire. A worker thrusts a long blowpipe (in glassworkers'
terminology a wand) into the molten mass in the furnace and twirls it
rapidly. The end of the wand, armed with a ball of refractory clay,
collects a ball of semi-liquid glass; the worker must estimate the
amount of glass to be withdrawn for the particular size of the bottle
that is to be made. This ball of glowing material is withdrawn from the
furnace; the worker rolls it on a sloping moldboard, shaping it to a
cylinder, and passes the wand to the blower who is standing ready to