Ink - Solid Pour ?

Hi : I have what looks like one of the funnel ink wells I dug probably over thirty years ago and wondering if anyone has an idea what it actually is. It is solid glass , crude it is 12 sided and has a normal base edge. It's hard to see in the pictures but even has what looks like a "milk" stream running through it in the top half.
It's approx. 2 5/8" high and 2 1/4" accross the flats of the sides.

Any input would be appreciated. Pictures enclosed.

Thanks

jaroadshow.

Here's another picture.

Here's another picture.

Here's another picture.

Not a clue. Strange!

That's awesome!

I'd agree with the assessment that it is a solid pour into a cup mold for desktop funnel inkwells. Used to warm up the mold before starting regular production for the day I'd figure. One would think that most got recycled but perhaps the worker thought it would make a nice paperweight or trinket for children. Really nifty find, glad you kept it.

Except for the cup mold part you could be right.
I'm thinking more of a filler for something though. Maybe a door knob but I don't know why. Clay would be a cheaper filler.

I started over on this in Word, so I wouldn't be timed out.

I would like to have your solid pour find.- At this point in time I haven't acquired one for my brief case of samples to take to bottle clubs.

The practice of pouring these sold glass items was to pre-heat the molds for making every thing from bottles, to canning jars and glass insulators. The mid-west glass bottle clubs have collected big quantities of the solid canning jars. Some insulator collectors have some solid ones.

The object of preheating the molds was to give the glass a smoother flow against the mold cavity surface. This uniformity of thickness was what was called “whittle†by early glass book writers. It was done for several years and yet the book writers, seldom even knew about these solid mold pours, at least they didn't write about them very often. I have read a lot of books on early glass making and don't remember their test mention solid poured pieces.

Cold molds caused this whittle until about 1860. The press ware house in Wheeling, West Virginia owned by a Mr. Sweeney and a Mr. Matthews got the idea of having the foundry, that made their mold castings, follow the practice used by the plow point castings; in which they poured the molten metal on to a cold cast piece of solidified iron. This created a plow point that would wear better when plowing.

It took me over thirty years to find the answer of my question of Where, When, Why and Who started chilling the cavities of mold castings. At a Thatcher Glass big meeting of executives and managers. No one knew.

I found the answer in the book "EARLY AMERICAN GLASS" written by Rhea Mansfield Knittle in 1927 - two years before I was born. My blog on this subject calls the thickness affect - Cold Mold Ripple.


RED Matthews

Ctd. When they poured the solid jars in the molds they didn't fill them to the tops, especially the molds that had the finish threads in the mold tops. RED Matthews

Another possibility is a press-molded tumbler that was never plungered. About the right height.