Ruby Stain Pattern Glass

Huge natural gas fields were found in Ohio and Indiana and exploited by glass makers. The natural gas was often offered free along with land by towns, if the glass manufacturer would open up a glass house in their town. Gasifiers were also developed for converting coal to gas to fire the furnaces.

The glass makers also figured out a way to make their pressed glass look like costly cased and cut glass. Prior to the 1880s in this country, the way to make glass with two colors was to case or flash a second layer of glass over the base glass form. Generally the base glass was crystal and the casing layer colored. After cooling, a skilled craftsman would cut a pattern through the flashed glass layer into the base color. This was an expensive process. Germany was a major source of much of this type of glass.

In December 1885, Letters Patent No. 331,824 was issued covering the production of "articles so nearly resembling [colored] cut ware that the difference can only be detected by an expert,and...be indistinguishable...from flash glass."[See Heacock, Book VII, page 7.] The idea was simple and inexpensive. Take a piece of deep pressed glass and stain the raised surfaces producing inexpensive imitation cased glass. The Letters Patent was issued to Henry Mueller in 1888. It can be found in Heacock's Book VII, page 8. In Europe, staining was used in Bohemian glass factories and picked up by British glass makers in the mid-1800s. [See, Hajdamach, Charles R.: "British Glass 1800-1914" Antique Collectors' Club; 1993; p.3.] In the 1950s, we thought that ruby stained glass was actually flashed with a thin layer of red glass. Many dealers and collectors still inaccurately refer to ruby stain glass as ruby flash glass.

Amber staining was available in this country by 1885. The technique which used silver nitrate probably originated in Germany. Many skilled glass workers immigrated from Germany and England, and carried their skills and knowledge with them. The next key invention was that of staining glass with a ruby color. The color is developed by reheating the glass, painted with copper salts, under reducing conditions.

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