The Alchemy of Christian Dorflinger (1828-1915)
My late parents-in-law were collectors of Dorflinger glassware. At one point, not long before my widowed father-in-law's death at 85, he generously gifted his table service to the Dorflinger Glass Museum at White Mills, near Hawley, PA. The museum was close to where he and his late wife had lived and often visited. A few days after his death in April 2025, my wife, daughter-in-law and I visited the museum in the hope, perhaps, of seeing the donated service on display.
The Dorflinger Glass Museum, Hawley, PA
Unfortunately, his collection was no longer available to view. We nevertheless enjoyed the quality of the Dorflinger glasswork on display, showcasing as it does the work of the nineteenth-century artisans who utilised copper and stone wheels to cut quality glass to a high degree of perfection and stunning beauty. I do not propose discussing the engraving aspects of the Dorflinger glass, but I would describe it as exceptional. The quality of the clientele matched the glassware for which the engravers laboured and perfected their art during the lifetime of the Dorflinger factory at Hawley. All of the glasswork photographs shown in this article are my own, taken at the museum.
By way of a brief background, Christian Dorflinger (1828-1915) was a native Alsatian-German born in Rosteig, France. He began learning the basics of glassmaking as an apprentice at the age of ten. After his widowed mother relocated him to America, he found work in a factory producing pharmaceutical bottles in New Jersey. In 1852, Dorflinger was tasked with designing a glass chimney to complement a new kerosene burner. Soon afterwards, he moved to Brooklyn, establishing his factory the following year.
Christian Dorflinger
By 1858, he had expanded his line to include a variety of cut, engraved, and plain tableware. As Dorflinger's company grew, he needed more manufacturing space. In 1865, he opened the first of five pot furnaces in White Mills, four miles from Hawley, and his first cutting shop soon followed. As production increased, so did his reputation, and Dorflinger eventually supplied glassware to presidents and the wealthiest American families, such as the Vanderbilts. He even placed a glass service for King Edward VII.
What caught my imagination as I progressed through the glorious little museum was the information about glass production itself (upon which the small Pennsylvanian village had once heavily relied before the factory's closure in 1921). The glass was blown by skilled artisans known as "gaffers" before entering the cutting workshops. But what happened before this was of greater interest to me. We know that glass is made from sand, which means quartz in the sand. Pure quartz sand is unsuitable for making glass, and impurities such as soda ash are added to lower its melting point and make it easier to work with (“annealed”). The sand and soda ash are therefore melted to produce the required quartz, a crystalline silica found in all rocks. Without going into too much chemistry, it contains perfectly balanced silicon and oxygen. Silicon comprises four "valence" electrons, which bond with four oxygen atoms (or dioxide). 50% of the glass consists of ground-up quartz, which Dorflinger sourced from within the United States.
Some 40% of the composition of Dorflinger's formula for glass (with some variation) was lead, which he imported from England. Lead glass contains lead oxide, a mixture of lead and air, which, when added to potash, makes for a more viscous fluid, ensuring that the mixture is softer, more pliable to blow, and easier to shape. Lead enhances the brilliance of glass and provides a distinctive ring sound when tapped due to its higher density. Thus, while lead is not an essential component of standard glass, the very fact that it can be worked at lower temperatures means that the end product can the better be beautified by the engraver and it also, crucially, allowed glass to be made without the characteristic bubbles we see in older glassware. In short, lead oxide provides apparent, flawless objects. The lead oxide compound (lead and oxygen) was extracted from this.
The remaining 10% is potassium carbonate (or "potash"), which was imported from his native Germany. Potash or potassium carbonate combines water-soluble salt derived from ancient plants in a crystalline form and silvery white alkaline metal elements. Therefore, like lead oxide, it is already a compound material of contrasting opposites – that of a living substance and that of a metal. The amount of potash added to the glass mixture is much less than that of the lead oxide.
Nevertheless, they constitute about 50% or half of the substance comprising the high-quality glass manufactured by Dorflinger. Wheels mixed these constituent components, which were then shovelled into a four-foot-high kettle (known as a "pot") and heated to exactly 2,300⁰F (1,260⁰C °c) inside a furnace. Dorflinger had five pots at his White Mills factory. Once heated to the correct specification, the furnace heat was gradually reduced to room temperature, before removing the pot. This process created a liquid with the consistency of molasses or honey. A pipe was then dipped into the substance and blown by a craftsman into the shape of the required glass object before being thoroughly cooled and transferred to the cutting workshop.
Manufacturers like Dorflinger would add oxides to the mixture to colour the glass. For example, copper or chrome oxide would be added to the lead, ground quartz, and potash mixture to get green. These oxides are called "pigs" and were typically pre-measured before adding to a batch of the glass mixture. The required colour would then change as the temperature in the pot rose, altering the appearance of the honey-like liquid that the gaffer would then work with.
As I contemplated this process, it struck me as a profoundly alchemical process. True, the purpose of mixing and firing the mixture for glass was essentially a commercial exercise, but the objective was not solely that; Dorflinger was creating fragile things of beauty from the elements of the earth in a process of transmutation that culminated into a final, singular, purified, and translucent substance we know as glass. We can see clear parallels if we reflect on the qualities of the original substances and those of the finished product with spagyric alchemy's process of extracting, purifying, and recombining mineral components into a complete and purified higher form. The alchemists of an earlier age had utilised the same process of extraction to separate the active constituents, by a process of calcination which purified the remaining minerals, where the lead-oxide comprised of metal and oxygen was mixed with the potash of organic plant-based salt and metallic potassium, and the quartz of rock silicon and oxygen. The inert quartz does not react with the other substances as the silicon dioxide is melted, and these three pairs of purified ingredients then undergo a similar state of co-hydrolysis or recombination to reintegrate them into a liquid extract. The honey-like substance of annealed molten glass was essentially the equivalent of the spagyric tincture, unified in one of the large four-foot-high pots fired to a specific heat of 2300⁰F.
Even though we can see a supremely alchemical metaphor in the process of glassmaking, there is something altogether unworldly about the nature of glass itself. This has not gone unnoticed in the spiritual tradition of the West either. In the Book of Revelation, the foundations of the New Jerusalem are described as follows:
"And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and shewed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, having the glory of God: and her light was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal … And the building of the wall of it was of jasper: and the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass. And the foundations of the city's wall were garnished with precious stones. The first foundation was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, a chalcedony; the fourth, an emerald; the fifth, sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolyte; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, a topaz; the tenth, a chrysoprasus; the eleventh, a jacinth; the twelfth, an amethyst. The twelve gates were twelve pearls: every several was of one pearl, and the city's street was pure gold, as it was transparent glass. And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it. And the city did not need the sun or the moon to shine in it." (Revelation 21:10 ff).
Much can be interpreted from the passage of the transformed, crystalline Jerusalem of the New Earth. When speaking of transformation and the purification of the earthly form into something eternal, immortal and transmuted, the seventeenth-century English alchemist Robert Fludd spoke of the three essential processes of separation, purification and reunification as "three Suns in one". He referred to the Life, Light and Heat of the divine spirit concealed within all, which is only dimly reflected in the material Sun, Moon and stars we see. Glass, then, is the perfect medium for our analogy, since it allows light to travel through its reintegrated substance. It is a metaphor for transforming earthly forms into spirit, a point not missed in the Bible, since glass was a precious and rare commodity in ancient times. When the reintegrated Heavenly City is described as having "a sea of glass, like crystal" before the throne of God (Revelation 4:6), the image is that of clarity and purity.
Robert Fludd
In his vision of Heaven, Ezekiel described "an expanse, like the awesome gleam of crystal" (Ezekiel 1:22). This glass association with spiritual perfection suggests a connection between transparency and divinity. Indeed, creating glass from raw materials refined through intense heat to produce something pure and translucent mirrors itself philosophically, as the Man of Desire departs the dark night of the soul to perceive the divine reflected in all. Cut glass in particular allegorises the ideal state of the transformed mind; for its substance alone is insufficient, it must be shaped and then beautified by the hand of God:
"And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another" (2 Corinthians 3:18).
By its very definition, transformation is a process, much like crafting fine glass. The raw materials are collected together, refined by separating any impurities, some added to anneal them, and then heated to combine everything. So it is with any alchemical transmutation, be it spagyric or philosophical, since what is sought is the spirit contained in the material and to make it useful.
There is something else: just as the artisan and entrepreneur Christian Dorflinger made his own way in the world by hard graft and developed a passion for his craft, so the gaffer's work at the glass factory was to shape the substance of glass before passing it on to be cut and finalised into something even more beautiful. It is a supreme metaphor of a man changing something for the better, leaving a legacy of light and beauty behind him, not destruction and carnage. We see then how the crystalline city of the New Jerusalem reflects its original form in memory only, since, like glass, it has been made in the furnace, shaped by the hand of man, then cut by a craftsman. So, it is with the Master Artisan and Great Architect of worlds.
This paper is dedicated in grateful memory to J. Raymond Moran (1939-2025)
