Klarinet Archive - Posting 000399.txt from 2004/07

From: "Lelia Loban" <lelialoban@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] Reed profiling
Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2004 10:44:50 -0400


Gary Truesdail wrote,
>You know what is really cool, (coming from a 62 year old)?
>
>A reed glass that is really antique, found in the deserts of
>Nevada, Pink, Purple, Blue, Green, from the gold rush
>times, cut into a useable size, with edges sanded smooth.
>Every time I do a reed I think, "Wow, this glass is 150 years
>old" and I'm doing exactly what clarinet players did back
>then in order to play a show with Lola Montez. I sometimes
>stop and wonder if this glass is the result of a bar-room
>shootout or what.

Assuming you've got genuine, antique mine slag, have you ever had it tested
for radioactivity?

I'm a retired stained glass designer, builder and restorationist. I love
the look of glass slag, and made reed holders for my contra-alto clarinet
and my bass sax with slag-type glass left over from my business. I used
manufactured soda-lime art glass from a dealer. I didn't buy wild glass
for my studio and wouldn't trust wild glass (meaning glass formed in nature
or created as a byproduct of some other manufacturing process) for a reed
holder -- not that there's much genuine wild glass out there for sale,
anyway.

Most of the slag sold to tourists in the southwest today isn't really from
the gold rush era mines. Nearly all of the truly old slag was sold off
long ago. Some that's sold now is purchased and shipped from modern mines.
Some is simply manufactured, slag-type, "end-of-day" glass, from the same
art-glass manufacturers who supplied me. Even some manufactured slag-type
glass is better not used for storing beverages, because it may contain lead
or some of the commonly used as coloring agents, such as cobalt, arsenic
and selenium, that can leach out into liquid over time; but I think the
interval when a reed stays wet on the glass probably is too short for
anything to leech. Most of the documented hazard cases involved decorative
booze decanters. I wouldn't use art glass (unless it was sold as "safe for
tableware") for the type of reed holder that's designed to keep reeds
permanently wet. Arsenic-flavored reeds, anyone?

Some slag from the southwestern USA is perfectly safe (modern mine slag is
supposed to be tested before it can be sold), but some isn't so much cool
as *hot*. Wild glass formed in several different ways. Heat from blasting
with dynamite (not just in gold rush times, but much more recently, too)
melted and fused silica sand or sandstone that covered the lode matrix.
Also, some of the sorting processes involved melting ore so that layers
would form, separating the precious metals from the matrix. Some of the
metals in Nevada mines and meteor sites are radioactive, and glass from
those sites is radioactive, too. Some of the beads and small pieces that
curio shops in the southwest sell as "meteorite glass" may be genuine.
(It's formed here on earth, where the heat of a blazing meteor melts desert
sand, forms glass below the meteor and splashes some around the vicinity of
the crater.) Meteor glass can also be radioactive, depending on where the
meteor happened to hit.

When I was a child in the 1950s, my family used to drive back and forth
between California and Oklahoma in the summer. We varied the route and
took a lot of side trips. On visits to old gold and silver mines, we found
and bought interesting rocks, fossils and, yes, slag glass. The worst
case, fortunately now rare: Some curio sellers snuck into atomic test
sites in the southwest, back in the 1940s and 1950s, and collected glass to
sell to tourists. Curio dealers all along Route 66 offered me "genuine
atomic glass," and would shine a black light to "prove" the glass was
radioactive. (I should mention this experience to people who think times
always change for the worse.) I never bought any. I knew that glowing
under black light wasn't the same thing as "glowing in the dark," and
assumed the curio dealers were lying to drive up the price. After all,
these were the same dealers who sold "genuine Navajo beadwork" from which
they sometimes forgot to remove the "Made in Japan" labels. I didn't want
any radioactive curios in my collection anyway. I lived near a Nike
Missile site, participated in "Duck and cover!" drills in school and had a
horror of the whole subject. Therefore I was surprised and dismayed when
an article about "atomic glass" appeared in a stained glass trade magazine
-- in the 1990s!

Evidently, some of that atomic glass was genuinely radioactive. Some got
re-labelled as mine slag to make it sell, after the market for "atomic"
curios collapsed. (Remember "Radium Red" tableware?) When I read that
article, I raised the radioactivity question with my dad, who still had a
couple of buckets of rocks and fossils in his garage. He and a friend with
a Geiger counter soon discovered that, sure enough, some of our glass slag
was radioactive --- mildly so, fortunately.

Dad said, "Oh, well. I always did say that garage was a toxic waste dump."

Lelia Loban
http://members.sibeliusmusic.com/LeliaLoban
Re-defeat Bush in 2004!

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