2025 Poster Session

Frederick Carder (1863-1963) was a noted glass designer who cofounded Steuben Glass Works in Corning, New York, with Thomas G. Hawkes in 1903. In this period Carder also developed a golden, iridescent glass he named Aurene, inspired by the appearance of weathered Ancient Roman glass where the glass surface was modified over hundreds of years due to water exposure in a burial environment. This paper will discuss the complex historic manufacturing process of Aurene and the preliminary findings of a study to investigate the surface and body of the glass. 

Prior to cofounding Steuben, Carder previously worked with John Northbridge and as a designer at Stevens & Williams, where he helped reintroduce colored glass to the firm. It is likely that Carder began to explore concepts related to the glass that he would later name Aurene during his time at Stevens & Williams. Carder developed a method for creating an iridescent effect in a leaded soda lime silicate glass and submitted a patent for the gold iridescent glass Aurene on September 6, 1904. In 1905 Carder, through Steuben, debuted a line of blue Aurene decorative glass objects. Although other glass designers were creating iridescent glass at the same time, Frederick Carder’s process had only minimal overlap with the processes used by these other designers. 

The process for creating an Aurene object is complex and contains several steps. Frederick Carder was known to be significantly secretive about his glass compositions and processing, but he also made significant notes and recorded observations in his personal notebooks. Carder’s Aurene glass for production was a soda lime silicate glass with added oxides of silver and nickel. This base glass was melted, and the object was then blown under reducing conditions, creating an exterior layer of reduced metal oxides. Next, the object was sprayed with tin chloride and heated in an oxidizing flame to produce the iridescent effect. All of these steps were done fully by hand, so the evenness of the metal oxide layer, the deposition of the tin salts, and the evenness of the exposure to the oxidizing flame were all the product of the skill of the glassblower creating the object.  

This complex, multistep process creates a glass that has compositional differences across the bulk and surface. While Carder’s Aurene glass has been written about numerous times from an art historical perspective, scientific investigations of the glasses are difficult to find. Samples of gold Aurene glass were investigated though spectroscopic techniques, including x-ray fluorescence (XRF), scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive spectroscopy (SEM-EDX), Raman spectroscopy, and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). Through these studies the authors were able to begin to form a picture of the structure and composition of the Aurene glass, with a strong focus on the differences between surface and body. Finally, future work will be discussed, including recreating some of Carder’s Aurene compositions and techniques with a particular focus on furnace conditions.