LECTURES Between the 5th and 9th of June 2012 was held our annual meeting in USA, a very successful meeting very well organized by Jane Shadel Spillman and the Corning Glass Museum. In this issue we publish a section of the papers presented in this meeting.
History of American Glassmaking Jane Shadel Spillman. Corning. New York
The English colony of Jamestown, Virginia was the first European settlement in North America, and when it was established, the settlers brought a group of glassblowers with them. The English investors thought that glass production would be a good use for the limitless forests of the New World. England, at this time was being rapidly denuded of wood and the government thought saving the existing trees for shipbuilding was important. However, the hardships of the new world, and the cost of shipping the glass made back to its markets in England made the
business a failure. Other glasshouses were started in Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania in the 17th century, but all were failures as it was easier and cheaper to import European glass for windows and tableware. The first successful glass manufactory in the colonies was that of Caspar Wistar, a Philadelphia brass-button manufacturer, who had immigrated from Germany. He imported German glassblowers in 1739 to staff the factory he established in southern New Jersey. Although English law
forbade all manufacturing in the colonies, Wistar ignored the law and produced window glass and bottles, the types most needed in the new world, until 1783‌ Another German entrepreneur, Henry William Stiegel, also started glass manufacturing, but he concentrated on tableware in his production, which lasted from 1763 until 1774. The third successful glasshouse in the United States was started by another German, John Frederick Amelung, who, unlike Wistar and Stiegel, was a glassmaker when he came to the United States, and he came here with workmen, to start his own glass business in
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