The heated glass spins, held in place on a lathe. Jack Korfhage leans in, blowing into a piece of tubing as he carefully manipulates the glass from the inside with his breath and from the outside with metal tools, gloved hands and a series of blowtorches that range between 4,000 and 5,000 degrees. Eyes intent on his work, he molds the glass into a seal that can withstand a major chemical reaction without leakage or cracks.
A piece of glass has infinite possibilities in Korfhage’s hands. His lab is littered with projects, some practical and others whimsical, like a glass dragon with flame flaring from its snout or a three-tiered glass aquarium that is home to a couple of fish and copious amounts of plants and gravel. His project of the day is a fluidized bed reactor, a three-chambered glass apparatus that allows sophisticated chemical reactions to take place.
Korfhage, 62, is an industrial glassblower for chemical and polymer manufacturer Albemarle Corporation. He develops and creates glass vessels on demand for the chemists and chemical engineers in the company’s research and development department. That means figuring out how to make the vessel encompass and facilitate the chemical reaction its designers want, something that is sometimes easier said than done.
“We consult with the chemists and chemical engineers to find out what they want the project to accomplish,” Korfhage says. “It’s our job to get the glassware right in a timely manner.”
Each project, from design to finished product, takes about three days. In a month, Korfhage will see between 50 and 60 projects, including repairs.
“Sometimes something won’t work the way we wanted it to,” his former apprentice, Ben Spalding, says. “Then we have to look at it, figure out what went wrong and redesign it so it will work the way it should.”
Korfhage is what is known as a master glassblower, and he has been blowing glass for 43 years. As a young man in New Jersey, he would watch a neighbor work with glass through the window of his workshop.
“I was fascinated with the art,” Korfhage says. “It so happens that the only program for scientific glassblowing was in New Jersey, and that’s what I decided I wanted to pursue.”
Korfhage graduated from the scientific glassblowing program at Salem Community College in Penns Grove, N.J., apprenticed, and landed the job at Albemarle, where he has been for 28 years.
Korfhage had his own apprentice in Spalding, who had been with him at Albemarle for two years before leaving the company. Spalding, originally from Boston, began in glassblowing as an artist and decided to pursue scientific glassblowing.
“He’s not going to tell you this, but he is one of the best in the field,” Spalding says. “He is a true master of his craft.”
The benefits of having an in-house glassblower are many, Korfhage says. Not only is a vessel available for use within three days, chemists and chemical engineers have a say in the design process. Still, industrial glassblowers are becoming a rarity because of cost-cutting measures by an industry that gives them a purpose.
“It’s the bean counters,” Korfhage says. “It really depends on what you think time is worth. How much time and money does a project lose when it’s waiting for something that takes six weeks to be delivered from another company but we can have finished in three days?”
Korfhage rarely makes the same vessel twice. Sometimes a project will start off small. As the trials it is used to conduct increase in size, so will the size of the vessel. The lab is the realm of the creative, where nothing is too strange to be a possibility.
“Weird is routine for us,” Korfhage says. “We never know what we’re going to get asked to do. We do a lot of multi-jacketed vessels, but each one is unique in its own way.”
A vessel takes shape on a lathe, which rotates the heated glass consistently. Korfhage shapes it by heating parts of the glass with blowtorches and shaping it with a steady stream of air he blows through a tube and metal tools. After the piece is finished and cooled, it is placed in an oven and heated to 570 degrees Celsius [1,058 degrees Fahrenheit] before cooling again in a process called annealing, which prevents the glass from shattering under stress.
Glassblowing is second nature, ?Korfhage says as he moves about the lab with ease, because he has been doing it for so long. He has never been injured in the lab other than miniscule cuts on his fingers.
“I was always interested in science but couldn’t do the math,” he says. “Glassblowing is a perfect marriage of science and art.”
