The Blue Window Craze

Lately I've been thinking about blue glass. Blue window glass, specifically. In my hometown there were a number of houses that had blue glass, usually in a solarium. Not the whole house. The town's main period of growth was the 1930s to the 1950s.

I figured that our friend Paul Lukas would know. Anything that I think about he's already thought about in depth, so I asked. He didn't know it was a thing. So I sent him this photo, and then I started digging. It's so good. I haven't found anything that really explains why early 20th Century houses have blue glass, but there certainly were lots in the 1870s due, in large part, to a guy named General Pleasonton, and another guy named Dr. Ponza.

Pleasanton started the fire, so to speak, in 1876, in his address to the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture. The reprint of his presentation was printed on blue paper with blue ink. He attributed healing powers of all kinds to bathing in blue light. Is your pig poorly? Blue light.

One of my favorite quotes attributed to Pleasanton: "Boys with unsatisfactory legs, and girls with more tremors than are necessary or useful....and persons afflicted in a vague but objectionable way, and mysteriously described as invalid, all became suddenly healthy and strong after taking a few panes of blue glass."

Then came Seth Pancoast, later one of the founding members of Theosophy:

By 1877, blue glass was a craze. It was big in Watsonville, California.

And then eventually there were the detractors:

Poems:

And even the Blue Glass Schottische. A colleague from the forklift factory was kind enough to play it for me on the piano. Check back here later for an audio recording.

By 1889 blue glass was relegated to the trash heap with its fellow fads of the past, like crazy quilts and roller skates.

Roller skates have come back into fashion many times, as have crazy quilts. Is it time for the rebirth of the blue glass craze? Oh right. Science.