While conducting my research, I learned there is a long history of child laborers in the American glass industry. Initially, young boys worked as apprentices alongside their male relatives to learn the family trade of glassblowing. Therefore, although children were working, the skills they learned led to a future career.1
However, the invention of the mechanical press around 1825 and the subsequent industrialization of the glass business brought an end to the apprenticeship system. The mechanical press meant that less-skilled workers could be employed in glass factories. Therefore, children were not trained to learn glassblowing, but were instead hired as cheap sources of labor in the bottle and tableware sectors.
By the mid-1800s, production teams in glasshouses were made up of 2 to 3 boys as young as 10 years old, and an older glassblower. As Harriet Van der Vaart described in a report for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), “…The glassblower pours the molten glass into the molds; a boy sits and closes the molds; another one picks the bottle out of the molds and puts them on a long stick or handle, and puts them in front of a small furnace….called ‘the glory-hole,’ where the top or neck of the bottle is finished….the boys carry them into the annealing furnaces, where they are gradually cooled.”2