Manufacture of Solid Glass Spheres
April Sixth
My grandfather taught me how to knuckle
down. That is, he taught me how to play
marbles, and when I spent time with him
in my grandparents’ pink mobile home,
I’d often ask to play. He’d haul out his old
marbles from when he was a kid, and we’d
get down on the floor. He taught me to aim,
how to flick the marble out of my hand, just so.
And of course he sometimes let me win.
U.S. Patent № 432,127:
applied and granted in 1890: “Apparatus for
Rounding Plastic Clay Slugs,” covers both a
marble making device and a process, first
put into use in 1884 for turning out mass-
produced toys. One person could manufacture
eight hundred marbles per hour.
These marbles were all the evidence I had
of his youth. They were clay and glass
mostly, some chipped or cracked, but they
were all my favorite, the deep blues, reds,
greens and browns. They were childhood
for both of us.
