Glass: Shattering Notions
Long before being known as the Steel City, Pittsburgh was America's Glass City. The Glass exhibition showcases the beauty, science, utility and technology of Western Pennsylvania glass over the past 200 years.
While the story of glass in America began at Jamestown in 1608, almost 200 years passed before skilled glassworkers crossed the Allegheny Mountains and began production in Western Pennsylvania. Since 1797, when the region’s first two glasshouses opened, the conical furnace stacks of glass factories have been a defining feature of the region’s skyline. Scores of glasshouses followed, producing rivers of glass for an abundant variety of uses around the nation and eventually around the world. By the Civil War, the Pittsburgh region reigned as the center of the nation’s glass industry.
A generation later, Pittsburgh glass could be found everywhere: as tile for the walls of New York’s great transportation tunnels, in the searchlights on the Panama Canal, as insulators for endless miles of wire; in “Liberty lens” headlights for Ford automobiles, in beer halls and in bars. Yet this region also produced glass fine enough for use on the White House tables of five U.S. presidents and in embassies around the world. Bottles by the boxcar load and singular presentation pieces, Pittsburgh factories made it all. Gas and electric streetlights, lamps, light bulbs, and lamp chimneys, our factories lit the world. Lenses and traffic signals brought order and safety to railways, roadways, and runways and plate glass for large windows made department stores a reality, allowing consumers to shop from the sidewalk. Store fronts of Carrera glass, basement windows of glass block, skyscrapers sheathed with reflective glass windows – the uses for glass seemed endless.
The Pittsburgh region became a center for the production of glass, but also for innovations in its manufacture, design, and marketing. Glass: Shattering Notions tells that story, unraveling the complex 200 plus year history of this region’s first industry. With one of the premier regional collections of glass known, the exhibit features more than 500 glass objects, immersive environments, hands-on interactives, and audio and video to help you look at, not through the glass in your life and hopefully see and understand it in a new way.
While the story of glass in America began at Jamestown in 1608, almost 200 years passed before skilled glassworkers crossed the Allegheny Mountains and began production in Western Pennsylvania. Since 1797, when the region’s first two glasshouses opened, the conical furnace stacks of glass factories have been a defining feature of the region’s skyline. Scores of glasshouses followed, producing rivers of glass for an abundant variety of uses around the nation and eventually around the world. By the Civil War, the Pittsburgh region reigned as the center of the nation’s glass industry.
A generation later, Pittsburgh glass could be found everywhere: as tile for the walls of New York’s great transportation tunnels, in the searchlights on the Panama Canal, as insulators for endless miles of wire; in “Liberty lens” headlights for Ford automobiles, in beer halls and in bars. Yet this region also produced glass fine enough for use on the White House tables of five U.S. presidents and in embassies around the world. Bottles by the boxcar load and singular presentation pieces, Pittsburgh factories made it all. Gas and electric streetlights, lamps, light bulbs, and lamp chimneys, our factories lit the world. Lenses and traffic signals brought order and safety to railways, roadways, and runways and plate glass for large windows made department stores a reality, allowing consumers to shop from the sidewalk. Store fronts of Carrera glass, basement windows of glass block, skyscrapers sheathed with reflective glass windows – the uses for glass seemed endless.
The Pittsburgh region became a center for the production of glass, but also for innovations in its manufacture, design, and marketing. Glass: Shattering Notions tells that story, unraveling the complex 200 plus year history of this region’s first industry. With one of the premier regional collections of glass known, the exhibit features more than 500 glass objects, immersive environments, hands-on interactives, and audio and video to help you look at, not through the glass in your life and hopefully see and understand it in a new way.