Glassblower Plies Ancient Craft in High-Tech Setting

One by one, graduate students clutching cracked traps, broken bubblers and other jagged pieces of glassware march into Rick Gerhart’s subbasement workshop and tell their sad tales of busted research.

Gerhart is not a chemist, physicist or any other kind of scientist, but he can return shattered equipment and experiments to working order after too much heat, excessive pressure or a run-in with gravity.

As the California Institute of Technology’s only full-time glassblower, Gerhart is a very popular fellow on a campus of top-notch scientific research, Nobel laureates and--it turns out--occasional butterfingers.

“Rick’s great,” says Chris Thomas, a first-year chemistry graduate student whose custom-made condensation trap had a close encounter with the floor. “Our group has been here more frequently than most.”

Gerhart makes and repairs custom glass equipment--not everyday test tubes or beakers but pieces that are designed specifically for an experiment. His work can be as simple as a coil or as complicated as a vacuum system that fills half a lab.

Business is booming in the windowless room where Gerhart melts, shapes and fuses glass in front of a hot flame, much as glassblowers have for centuries.

“I’m probably about two weeks behind schedule right now, and that’s about normal,” he says just before flicking a Bic to light the natural gas-powered flame. “The only time it will slow down will be Christmas and New Year’s.”

There is no substance better than glass to contain chemical reactions: It typically doesn’t react with substances, can withstand heat and is transparent, so researchers can see what is happening.

“A guy came in today with a nice piece he’s using in the lab made out of polyurethane,” he says. “You could drop it on the floor and you could kick it, but he said as it heats up, it changes shape. So he wants the whole thing built out of glass.”

Gerhart’s subterranean workshop is lined with old cabinets filled with glass pipes and fittings that can be fused. It all seems out of place on a campus where scientists build femtochemistry lasers and gravity wave detectors.

But sophisticated research often requires the skills of a glassblower.

“Experiments are always going to be required,” said Caltech chemistry professor John Bercaw. “So wherever there’s experimental chemistry being done, there will always be a need for glassblowing.”

Puffing gently into a rubber hose connected to a heated Pyrex tube, Gerhart makes a glass bubble, which can become a receptacle. Another slim tube, slightly heated, can be coiled. Two large glass cylinders spun and heated on a giant lathe eventually fuse.

Machines aren’t likely to replace glassblowers, given the fragile nature of glass and the precision with which it must be handled. There’s also little need for mass production since much of the equipment works with only one experiment, Gerhart said.

“Grad students come in and say, ‘I want to do this and that,’ ” he says. “And I tell them we’ve done this before and we found this to work better. Usually they’ll go right along with you.”

Most major research universities employ glassblowers, though their ranks have been dwindling over the years as computer simulations have replaced some experiments, said Gary Coyne, a glassblower at Cal State L.A.

The biggest threats to the craft, at least on university campuses, are accountants who believe it’s cost-effective to use outside contractors or mail-order houses. But many have later regretted the move, he said.

“It’s being penny-wise and pound foolish,” said Coyne, who is incoming president of the American Scientific Glassblowers Society. “Why hold up a $10-million grant because you have to go off- site to get to a glassblower?”

Gerhart, who has worked in the field for 30 years, came to Caltech seven years ago, after working for other universities and research firms.

His father, who was a glassblower for Corning Glass and Gulf Oil Co., introduced his son to the art, though the 9-year-old Gerhart was more interested in baseball than beakers.

After abandoning college, he returned to the field and spent three years at a New Jersey technical school learning the particulars.

“So I paid them to learn what I could have learned at home,” he said.

He sometimes gets requests to fix antique vases or cracked souvenirs from Disneyland. Caltech students and faculty also ask him to teach classes in the art -- something he says he doesn’t have time to do.

“It’s always the same answer: If I take time to give classes, then this job you want done tomorrow won’t get done,” he says. “I tell them I’ll make a deal: I’ll promise not to do the chemistry if they don’t do the glassblowing. That way nothing will get blown up.”

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On the Net:

Glassblowers’ Society: https://www.asgs-glass.org

Caltech: https://www.caltech.edu