Two glasses of a Russian master are kept in a museum in New York: their secret cannot be unraveled for 200 years

What secret does the New York Corning glass museum keep in itself? The largest museum of glass products has two exhibits that ordinary visitors do not pay attention to. But the experts will never pass them by and will admire them for a long time. There is an opinion that the Italians are the founders of glassblowing. The Americans are proud to say that they have adopted this business, perfected it and are now the best craftsmen. About what secret the museum keeps in itself and what Russians have to do with it, the author of the channel “Studying Abroad + RF Smapse” told on the portal Zen.Yandex, and in this article we will tell you the story.

Both glasses have been a secret with seven seals for a long time. The author of both exhibits, a simple serf Sashka Vershinin, enjoys the reputation of a real-life Levsha and Kulibin from domestic glassblowing. Vershinin worked at the Bakhmetyevskaya glass factory and made beautiful sets for the royal palaces.

He even once received a nominal gift from the ruler of the Russian Empire for his work - a watch with a gift engraving. His works were so good that until now no one could repeat them. The same story with the glasses in the American Museum.

What is the secret of glasses

The master worked on them alone, so so far no master has been able to reproduce Vershinin's work. It was believed that his glasses were finely painted inside a mass of glass.

Once one of them was smashed due to an oversight, the museum curators examined the fragments and were very surprised. It turned out that this was not about painting, but about a composition created from various materials of natural origin. Human figurines are painted with paint, and everything else - trees, grass, houses - is made of moss, wood chips, genuine grass, straw and other materials of natural origin.

This means that the master used a faceted glass, made a copy of the inner wall of thin glass, and placed his pictures between them. He placed them so skillfully that not even the sharpest human eye could distinguish layers of air between the layers.

But how did the outer and inner layer connect? This riddle could not be solved for a long time.

• Some argued that it was about soldering cooled glass with hot, but in this case the temperature difference would inevitably cause splitting of the finished product.
• Traces of adhesive compositions could not be found either.
• One American from Berkeley even suggested that phosphorus ignition was used for welding: in this case, the edges would warm up more or less evenly, which would avoid splitting and cracking. But where, in this case, are the traces of soot and why didn’t the materials laid between the layers burn out? But neither sooty walls nor charred chips were found inside.

What helped solve the mystery

Once, exactly the same glass with a chipped rim came to the restoration workshop. Then the employees managed to understand that a specialized mastic based on a photopolymer was used to connect the outer and inner glasses, which turned into crystals under the influence of sunlight. A simple and even illiterate person, who did not have the opportunity to control his own person, was able to invent a prototype of ultraviolet glue based on methacrylate a century and a half before our contemporaries.

The work of the master is so delicate that even the most attentive person cannot detect traces of gluing: from the outside, the glasses look cast, without the slightest defects, cracks, air bubbles.

This is possible only if the distance between the outer and inner parts is constant and does not exceed a tenth of a millimeter. It turns out that the curiosity that came out of the hands of a peasant 220 years ago today can only be reproduced by a high-precision and ultra-modern CNC machine with A-class accuracy. The permissible probabilistic deviation does not exceed 0,25 mm from the normal.