(fire whooshing)
- My favorite part of my
day is when I'm actually
at my bench making these
really cool pieces of glass.
Pretty much the possibilities are endless.
If you can think about it,
then I can make it for you.
My name's Christine Roeger,
and I'm a scientific glass blower here
at Arizona State University.
Most people that don't grow up
in scientific glass blowing world
don't even know scientific
glass blowing exists.
I work with borosilicate
glass and quartz glass
to fabricate different pieces of glass
for different kinds of research.
And I work with that glass
with my hands and a flame,
and the flame produces
the flame temperature
of about 3,000 degrees, and
that gets the glass hot enough,
and then kind of just fabricate
it into what it needs to be.
My customers are PhD
students in chemistry,
and I get to sit down and
talk with people from all over
the world, and they're doing
all sorts of cool research,
and every day's a new day.
(soft music)
- I'll get some rod handy for you.
- I actually started as,
wanted to be an elementary school teacher,
and when I kinda had down time
in between going to school
I'd come into the shop,
'cause my dad worked here.
So I would say like a
couple years into college
is when I decided that I wanted to be
a scientific glass blower.
So I did a four year
apprenticeship program
here with my dad.
- It looks like this has to
be adjusted just a little bit.
My father, just like myself, and Christy,
we have a shop at home,
and so when my father,
you know I was probably 12
or 13 and I would go out
and do little things for him, you know,
just cutting tubes and
cleaning up the bench,
which was something I
didn't learn very well
because my bench usually looks terrible.
- [Christine] Pretty messy.
- That was about the same
age that Christy started.
You know, I would give her tubes to cut.
- Then me and Jenny and Sarah
out blowing bubbles and--
- [Mike] Right yeah,
hand them the blow holes
and heat up a gob of glass
and they blow up these
big bubbles and break them off.
- Pop.
Did you ever do that with your dad?
- Oh yeah, yeah.
- Like when you were young?
- [Mike] Yeah.
- It was really great training as
a glass blower with my
dad, he's very patient,
and very encouraging,
he's a very good mentor.
(soft music)
The skill of rotating glass
takes a very long time
to be able to get your hands
to move the same speed.
We can't like, watch a video
and learn how to do it,
you need like hands on,
somebody standing behind you,
kind of in your ear reminding
you to rotate, rotate, rotate,
okay, now come out of the flame,
and teaching you, like that, hands on.
Have to have coordination,
good manual dexterity,
patience, and just have the knowledge
of chemistry and physics.
If I didn't have any background
in chemistry they would
come in and I would have no
idea what they're talking about.
(soft music)
So just go ahead and light your torches.
The glass blowing class that I teach
is actually nicknamed burn and bleed 101.
And it's kind of like, the ritual,
everybody has to get their little burn,
I have a bucket of ice for them
because unfortunately, hot
glass and cold glass look alike.
There you go, rotate it back off center,
rotate, rotate.
Might wanna pull off that
little bump on the bottom.
So if you have a little rod.
The main focus of the
class is to give students
an idea of what they can do
for themselves in their lab.
They can make their own test tubes
and they can make their own
little round bottom flasks.
So it's very cool to see
that they kinda continue
it on once they're out of the class.
(soft synth music)
- Having a full time person available
with the kind of expertise
that Christy has,
is hard to find.
She has a talent for being able
to take a complicated design
and look at it and understand
what the critical elements are
so that those are the first priorities
during the glass blowing process.
When it comes to understanding
the properties of the glass,
she has good insight to
know how that's going
to interact with the experiments
that people wanna perform.
(soft music)
- There's still enough work
for one glass blower in here,
but definitely the work
load has gone down,
'cause when there were three of us
in here full time it was when
chemistry was more physical
and like the volumes
of things were bigger,
so we were doing big flasks.
A lot of times now they're
on like nano scale.
I guess the shop really hasn't
changed very much, has it?
- No it hasn't.
- The world just doesn't seem to be
replacing these glass blowers,
and so Christy's a third
generation glass blower,
and it's not clear what's
gonna happen when she retires.
We don't want her to retire.
- I'm so glad and thankful
that I've been able to
carry on the tradition with
my dad and my grandfather.
Ideally I wanted to train my oldest son
to be the next apprentice in here.
It would be great if we
could get another one in.
- It would, it'd be nice
to go for four generations,
if we could.
- As of now I'm not gonna be
able to train an apprentice,
so, I don't know what's gonna happen
when I do retire, when I move on.
It would have been really cool to be able
to carry on that tradition.
