- This Technicality episode is brought to you
by Brilliant.org.
Hey guys, I've been traveling through Europe
for the past couple of weeks, let's get technical.
A bit ago I made a guest video for Mike Boyd
who has an excellent channel where he learns new skills.
Almost 1000 people applied.
I was one of the 18 finalists,
and while my video wasn't one of the three selected
to actually be on his channel,
Mike quite liked the video nonetheless
and encouraged me to upload it to mine.
So, here you go,
this week I learned glass blowing.
The other day I was talking on the phone
with my grandmother and she told me
that my great great grandfather was a glassblower.
In 1912 he immigrated from Belgium to America,
specifically a city called, Lancaster in Ohio.
Lancaster is nicknamed the glass city and for good reason.
In the 1900s Lancaster was bopping when it came
to the glass making industry,
with many French and Belgian glass workers moving there
to work for a company called, Anchor Hocking.
When I learned this I was instantly intrigued
and I thought it would be really cool
to follow in my great great grandfather's footsteps.
This week I learned glass blowing and this
is day one, hour zero.
Let's take a trip.
(upbeat music)
Because I have no idea where to start
I decided to go to somewhere and to someone that does.
- My name is Treg Silkwood.
I'm gonna be instructing you to work with glass.
- Treg has been glassblowing for 25 years
and in that time he's made some pretty amazing stuff.
If anyone can teach me glassblowing he can.
He works here, at the Bay Area Glass Institute.
A nonprofit public access glass studio
in San Jose, California.
Okay, so I have three milestones.
To make a flower, to make a cup and to make a bowl.
Let's start with the first one.
I'm gonna make a flower right now when I have
absolutely no glass blowing knowledge
and then I'll make another one at the end of the session
to see how I've improved.
However before I made a flower I would naturally
need to learn about the tools I would use
to make a flower.
- This is called a gaffer's bench.
Gaffer is the lead person in the glassblowing team.
- Cool.
- You'll be the gaffer this evening.
We use our left hand to rotate the iron back and forth.
This balances the glass.
We turn in relationship to how the glass is moving.
As far as the hand tools go this is called the jacks.
The jacks is our primary shaping tool.
We can use the blades, the side of the blades,
even the strap of the handle to shape the glass.
Put our hand on the handle we bring it up
we call this the psycho stabbing position.
(creepy music)
(screams)
We have a pair of tweezers,
albeit a large pair of tweezers.
You can see where it's heat tarnished.
You won't wanna grab right behind that.
If you grab back here you won't have the strength
to bend the spring.
A pair of diamond shears.
Good for cutting round bits of glass.
A pair of straight shears for cutting glass.
You don't expect to be able to cut glass
but when it's hot it's more or less like a thick fabric
until it cools down, then it's hard like a rock.
In the bucket behind us we have a wooden tool
called the block.
And we'll use this to shape and form the glass.
It's helpful to hold way up near the cup
versus way back here.
This is made out of cherry wood.
We use cherry wood 'cause it's a very fine grain wood
with a low resin content.
And it's kept soaking in water so it creates
a layer of steam between the glass and the tool.
The glass is melted in our furnace
which is this lovely apparatus over here.
The furnace melts the glass around 2000 degrees.
So inside is a big vat of about 500 pounds of molten glass.
- That furnace is about the same temperature as the magma
deep inside a volcano, that is crazy hot.
- [Treg] We pull it out on these long irons,
these are called, blowpipes and punties.
Blowpipes, as the name suggests, are hollow,
punties are solid.
- When they're not being used you can see
they're on fire right there.
The glass will only stick to things
that are over 1000 degrees
so the rods need to be preheated.
That's why after working with the glass for awhile
you need to dip your tools in the water
so the tools don't get too hot and stick to the glass.
- We have an apparatus over here called, the glory hole.
That's the heating chamber, and we'll be going in there
to get the glass soft and mailable.
Once we're finished making the projects
we're gonna put them into what's called, the annealing oven.
One of these metal boxes you see over here.
They're around 1000 degrees,
and all the pieces we make are gonna cool down overnight.
- [Alex] Now that I knew all the tools it was time
to make my first flower.
Treg walked me through the process, we did a dry run
and then it was time to start.
(upbeat music)
- And then I'm gonna come in and snip it.
Alright I'm gonna take this from you.
You can let go.
- Let go?
And that was it.
It didn't really look like a flower
and more of a chewed up leaf.
At the end of the video I'll try again
and see if I can do better.
Okay, Treg's about to show me
some of his glass making skills.
- Alright, so the glass came out of the furnace.
2100 degrees right now.
I'm gonna use my tweezers, just gonna warm up the tips.
This only took two minutes and 20 years to make.
- He just made that horse in the time it takes me
to brush my teeth, that's incredible.
It was then time for me to move on to my second milestone
making a cup.
- I have a blowpipe this time.
It's hollow.
I'm gonna start by getting some glass,
and then I'm going to shape it up and blow a bubble into it.
I'm gonna be using this metal table over here
called the marver, which is going to
shape and cool the glass.
I have some molten glass here.
When I cool it the skin of the glass starts to cool down
and stiffen up.
Heat and gravity are primary shaping tools.
So I negate gravity by turning the rod on center
which takes quite a bit of time to develop that skill,
now I kind of feel it.
We're gonna blow through the pipe
and we're gonna create a bubble.
And now we're going to allow this bubble to cool down
and we'll get another layer of glass over the top.
- Glassblowing is like onions and ogres,
they all have layers.
You can't just go into the furnace
and get all of the glass you want
because pipes and punties can only hold so much.
You've gotta get a bit of glass, shape it a bit
and then go in for more.
The cup, for example, had two layers of glass.
For the cup I decided to be a little saucy
and throw some color in there
which led me to ask, how does colored glass work?
To get different colors in glass
you add different metallic oxides.
For example the colors I chose for the cup
were dark blue which is made from cobalt oxide
and green which is made from chrome oxide and iron oxide.
To implement the color we use these little
sort of color chips made by companies
in Germany, New Zealand and the U.S.
Which you physically roll your glass into,
put in the glory hole for a bit
and then you've got colored glass.
Okay, onto making the drinking glass.
One thing you notice when glassblowing
is the way glass acts.
When you first get it out of the furnace
it's incredibly fluid, kinda like maple syrup,
you've gotta keep the rod spinning continuously
something that's way easier said than done.
But then tragedy struck.
The cup broke.
- [Treg] Boy howdy.
- So apparently what just happened is the cup
needed to be transferred from one rod to another
to open the mouth up
and to do that we take a drop of glass on the new rod
and stick it to the bottom of the cup,
however it wasn't sticking.
- Clear glass isn't sticking.
- Oh.
First I have to pay respects.
So I did the whole thing over and now I'm back
to where I left off.
(upbeat music)
with that milestone completed
let's move on to making a bowl.
Okay, I'm starting to get the hang of this now.
- [Treg] It's a very escapist art form.
- Yeah, no kidding it's incredibly relaxing.
- [Treg] 'Cause you have to be focused on it.
You can't be doing a laundry list of other things.
- Yeah.
- [Treg] And you do it well.
(mellow music)
- You'll notice that the bowl kinda ended up with
this cool curvy shape around the rim.
Well, that's because Treg spun the bowl
into a plate and when it fell there was no structure
so it just kinda draped over those points.
Once again, gravity is a useful tool.
It is time to make the second flower and this one
I'm gonna do with no help from Treg.
All on my own, let's see how this goes.
Another thing you'll notice is that glassblowing
doesn't have a ton of glassblowing.
Your breath is just another tool you have to work with
along with everything else.
A better name is just, glass working.
So, moment of truth.
How'd I turn out?
Well, here's the first flower alongside the new flower.
I would show them physically side by side
but the first one was so bad that we didn't even keep it.
Here's all three of the things I made
and to be honest these turned out
way better than I expected.
In just two hours I went form total scrub
to the creator of some pretty dope glassware.
Glassblowing was a really amazing experience.
I explored an art form that's incredibly fun and rewarding.
I can see why Treg made it his career
and why my great great grandfather did too.
The fist thing to do once you make a glass cup
is to fill it up halfway and put a cork in it.
Naturally, yeah of course that's what we all do.
However you'll notice that he cork will always
move toward the side of the half filled glass.
Why does this happen?
Well the cork will always float on the highest point,
and that highest point is gonna be on the edge
of the glass because the water sort of grasps to the side
creating a convex shape.
See, breaking something down into its core concepts
makes it easier to understand, doesn't it?
I'll leave this bonus question for you to figure out.
How can we make the cork float in the center
as opposed to the side?
Let me know in the comments down below what you think.
This question is straight from Brilliant.org
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and technology.
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Go forth and learn.
Oh and in case you missed it Twitter locked me out
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that I was too young for Twitter.
So that was fun.
Luckily I have it back now.
So follow me there for high IQ thoughts.
Like music is just wiggly air.
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I encourage you to check that out
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Thanks for watching DFTBA and explore on.