ABC's Of Old Glass [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONWhoever invented the alphabet can be credited with symbolizing the grunts, hisses, and groans that evolved into language from primitive man's first attempts to make known his feelings to others. Language is the human way of conveying intelligence from one mind to another over the barriers of space and time. The space covered may be but a few inches or a few feet, as in ordinary conversation. In this age it may be across thousands of miles, by voice carriage over wires or by radio waves. So much for vocal expression across "space." Conveyance across "time" requires a recording of the equivalent of speech in the form of written or printed words. Primitive man, after he developed speech, could yeU across perhaps a mile of space or whisper across a foot of it, but he was stymied in crossing time until he invented the ABC's and could record his speech by signs that another could read, understand, absorb, and re-utter in the form of speech. When we evolved the alphabet we had a scientific method of telling all the people of our own and succeeding generations what we thought and did, and how we did it.Amazingly the subject of this book. Old Glass, appears to be as old as the alphabet; as old as the alpha, beta, gamma of the Greeks; the aleph, beth, gimmel of the Hebrews; the cheth, zain, vau of the Sumerians; and the abouk, berbi, hita of Egypt.Some of us collect a kind of glass called "pressed" which we fondly believe was first brought into production in our nineteenth century. Deming Jarves of the Sandwich Glass Company is thought by many to have been the first American glassmaker successfully to press glass. One writer has said, "Until Jarves pressed a tumbler in a pressing mold, all glass5