New boiler list!

[Jonas Clark-Elliott]

On my photos page: updated list with 14 since-discovered designs (one older one removed, reason noted) as well as two more hand-powered boilers and two French liquid hourglasses! These are drawn in Windows Paint, by a technique that almost fits the description "pixel art", i.e. many (but not all) parts are drawn pixel-by-pixel while zoomed in - a lot of fun to do, really.

[Jonas Clark-Elliott]

Yes, they do sort of look like really imaginitive bongs, don't they? The creators of these were, without a doubt, trained in scientific glassblowing and working with a glass lathe. If these are entirely free-blown, I will be stunned.

No idea what S. Vera and F. Vaudan did besides these, or how many of these they made. S. Vera's two known lamps (photo showing both is in my photos section - a shot of four boilers) have very distinctive bases - a chrome cylinder on a flat chrome square - and are both imaginitive but very different; one, a boiler with a donut, the other an intermittent double fountain with a return tube. F. Vaudan's sticker has been found on two handboilers as well as one of the more common lavaboiler styles, the with-beads variety with a flared chrome base.

A different S. Vera sticker has been seen on a brandy pipe set - a pipe and a glass bowl to rest it in - so it seems S. Vera made other unusual glass goods as well!

For those wondering: A brandy pipe (sometimes incorrectly marketed today as a 'port pipe' or even as an 'absinthe bong') is a stemmed glass pipe having a wide bowl withg a narrow opening, which is intended to be warmed - either in the hand or over a spirit lamp - in the manner of a snifter, with the narrow top open for inhaling, but also having a stem for sipping. Most snifters have top openings that are too large for inhaling, but any smaller and they're impractiocal for drinking. The brandy pipe serves both purposes properly.

If anyone wants to know what these 'boilers' actually DO - that is, like I was when French collector Karoll tried to show me a photio of a boiler (no. 12 on my list) - I'll be happy to explain.

[Jonas Clark-Elliott]

Just posted it again, with some changes - not big ones, but ones which keep the integrity of "items in each group are to approximate relative scale". By the way, my HD crashed, and I lost a lot of photos. Would anyone who has photos of boilers send 'em my way, any/all you've got? I could really, really use 'em...

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