(fire whooshing)
- My favorite part of my day is when I'm actually
at my bench making these really cool pieces of glass.
Pretty much the possibilities are endless.
If you can think about it, then I can make it for you.
My name's Christine Roeger,
and I'm a scientific glass blower here
at Arizona State University.
Most people that don't grow up
in scientific glass blowing world
don't even know scientific glass blowing exists.
I work with borosilicate glass and quartz glass
to fabricate different pieces of glass
for different kinds of research.
And I work with that glass with my hands and a flame,
and the flame produces the flame temperature
of about 3,000 degrees, and that gets the glass hot enough,
and then kind of just fabricate it into what it needs to be.
My customers are PhD students in chemistry,
and I get to sit down and talk with people from all over
the world, and they're doing all sorts of cool research,
and every day's a new day.
(soft music)
- I'll get some rod handy for you.
- I actually started as,
wanted to be an elementary school teacher,
and when I kinda had down time in between going to school
I'd come into the shop, 'cause my dad worked here.
So I would say like a couple years into college
is when I decided that I wanted to be
a scientific glass blower.
So I did a four year apprenticeship program
here with my dad.
- It looks like this has to be adjusted just a little bit.
My father, just like myself, and Christy,
we have a shop at home, and so when my father,
you know I was probably 12 or 13 and I would go out
and do little things for him, you know,
just cutting tubes and cleaning up the bench,
which was something I didn't learn very well
because my bench usually looks terrible.
- [Christine] Pretty messy.
- That was about the same age that Christy started.
You know, I would give her tubes to cut.
- Then me and Jenny and Sarah out blowing bubbles and--
- [Mike] Right yeah, hand them the blow holes
and heat up a gob of glass and they blow up these
big bubbles and break them off.
- Pop.
Did you ever do that with your dad?
- Oh yeah, yeah.
- Like when you were young?
- [Mike] Yeah.
- It was really great training as
a glass blower with my dad, he's very patient,
and very encouraging, he's a very good mentor.
(soft music)
The skill of rotating glass takes a very long time
to be able to get your hands to move the same speed.
We can't like, watch a video and learn how to do it,
you need like hands on, somebody standing behind you,
kind of in your ear reminding you to rotate, rotate, rotate,
okay, now come out of the flame,
and teaching you, like that, hands on.
Have to have coordination, good manual dexterity,
patience, and just have the knowledge
of chemistry and physics.
If I didn't have any background in chemistry they would
come in and I would have no idea what they're talking about.
(soft music)
So just go ahead and light your torches.
The glass blowing class that I teach
is actually nicknamed burn and bleed 101.
And it's kind of like, the ritual,
everybody has to get their little burn,
I have a bucket of ice for them
because unfortunately, hot glass and cold glass look alike.
There you go, rotate it back off center,
rotate, rotate.
Might wanna pull off that little bump on the bottom.
So if you have a little rod.
The main focus of the class is to give students
an idea of what they can do for themselves in their lab.
They can make their own test tubes
and they can make their own little round bottom flasks.
So it's very cool to see that they kinda continue
it on once they're out of the class.
(soft synth music)
- Having a full time person available
with the kind of expertise that Christy has,
is hard to find.
She has a talent for being able to take a complicated design
and look at it and understand what the critical elements are
so that those are the first priorities
during the glass blowing process.
When it comes to understanding the properties of the glass,
she has good insight to know how that's going
to interact with the experiments that people wanna perform.
(soft music)
- There's still enough work for one glass blower in here,
but definitely the work load has gone down,
'cause when there were three of us
in here full time it was when chemistry was more physical
and like the volumes of things were bigger,
so we were doing big flasks.
A lot of times now they're on like nano scale.
I guess the shop really hasn't changed very much, has it?
- No it hasn't.
- The world just doesn't seem to be
replacing these glass blowers,
and so Christy's a third generation glass blower,
and it's not clear what's gonna happen when she retires.
We don't want her to retire.
- I'm so glad and thankful that I've been able to
carry on the tradition with my dad and my grandfather.
Ideally I wanted to train my oldest son
to be the next apprentice in here.
It would be great if we could get another one in.
- It would, it'd be nice to go for four generations,
if we could.
- As of now I'm not gonna be able to train an apprentice,
so, I don't know what's gonna happen
when I do retire, when I move on.
It would have been really cool to be able
to carry on that tradition.