Steuben

It's the end of an era for me, and of an era and then some for Steuben. I've admired the lead crystal produced by Steuben artisans for years, from a time even before I started my Corning research.  As a teenager I encountered one of their masterpieces ("Innerland," by Eric Hilton, shown above) in the National Gallery on some now-otherwise-forgotten visit to D.C., and, somewhat later, stumbled across their wonderful store in Manhattan.  For years that space, a cool, gray gallery on 5th at 56th Street, filled with beautiful objects I would never own, was an obligatory stop whenever I happened to be in the city.

Then came my time with Corning.  In the course of many trips to their corporate archives and offices I made excuses to visit the source itself, the Steuben workshop and, best of all, the furnace from whence came all of the glass used to make their crystal.  On the day I viewed it the furnace was near the end of its functional life (or, in the parlance, "campaign") which, for a glass furnace, is a pretty exciting time.  Pardon me if I get technical here, but it's one of the most interesting industrial processes I know of.  A glass furnace is itself constructed out of glass blocks.  Why?  Because molten glass is highly corrosive and will therefore eat its way through any material whatsoever and using anything other than glass--metal, ceramic, what have you--will result in contaminating each batch with non-glass ingredients.  Build the furnace out of glass (or at any rate something very close to it) and the only thing that gets added to the mix of materials is more of the same.  This does not solve all problems, however:  no matter how thick the refractory bricks used to build the furnace, eventually they will wear thin, signaling the end of that campaign.  This, in turn, means you are facing a total shutdown, dismantling, and reconstruction of the furnace before more glass can be made.  This is a very expensive operation and the glassmaker accordingly seeks to delay it as long as possible by using a special technique to prolong the life of the furnace.  And what is this technique?  As I witnessed it at Steuben, it consisted of a guy with a garden hose, occasionally spraying the bottom of the furnace with cold water so as to slow the increasing number of drip-throughs.  So in viewing Steuben's furnace at the end of its life what I saw was a glass ceiling through which occasional slow streams of red-hot molten glass began to drip, only to be met by a blast from the hose, after which the guy would go back to reading his paper.

We wrote the Corning book, Meg and I, in anticipation of (and part of) Corning's 150th anniversary.  It was a wonderful project, and in addition to the experience and pay (both of which I badly needed), Meg and I (as well as several hundred other luminaries) each received a piece of Steuben glass unique to the occasion.  And so I got to own a piece of my own after all.  I would show it if I could, but for now it's packed away somewhere; look for an update in, say, 2013.

As for Steuben's history, there's enough online, but the salient facts for this story are as follows:  having been founded in 1903, it was purchased by Corning in 1918, run not so much for profit as for pride for nearly a century, and then, in 2008, sold for @80% to a private equity group presumably eager to add it to its stable of luxury brands.  Ah, but this horse never ran as part of a team, so here we find ourselves, three years later, watching the old girl being put down.  It is a real shame, a loss to Corning and, dare I say, the nation.  Also to me.

But before it goes Steuben is selling off its stock, and so I did something I never expected to do:  I bought some.  Or rather, one.  And here it is:

I don't know that Talia ever wanted a piece of Steuben herself, but given her patience these past couple of years she has certainly earned it.  This one is for you, darling.