From Recycled Glass to Marbles
Marble King makes marbles from recycled glass for games and industries.
January/February 2009
Linda Shockley
 |
From the Cat's Eye to transparent colors, Marble King produces them all.
Doug Miller
|
Paden City, West Virginia, has a long history of glassmaking, dating back to the early 1900s. The Ohio River town, once home to at least 10 glassmaking companies, is still home to long-time manufacturer Marble King, which makes more than one million marbles each day: 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Who’s playing with all those marbles?
RELATED CONTENT
King Ranch Institute stampedes into future with unique curriculum....
Chicago program converts vacant lots to organic growing....
Michigan farm hooks visitors with reindeer and sleigh rides....
Interested birders have kept tabs on cavity-nesting birds and nest boxes for 10 years....
Take Care of Your Barn Cats and They'll More than Earn Their Keep...
Piles of raw, recycled glass, separated by color, glisten in the sun like a king’s ransom in the yard outside the brick Marble King building. It’s an unassuming soup-to-nuts factory that incorporates mounds of glass, corporate offices, a 28,000-square-foot manufacturing and production area, packaging shop, shipping dock and gift shop. Feel like a game of marbles? That’s easy. Just walk over to the free, public marbles ring and knuckle down with your shooter.
Berry Pink and Sellers Peltier founded Marble King in 1949. The company got its name from Pink, who – in traveling the country to host marble tournaments and giving away marbles at each stop – was dubbed the “Marble King.” Roger Howdyshell managed the factory and was critical to its success. He manufactured the first Cat’s Eye marble and developed a process for veneering marbles that lowered costs and enhanced color. Howdyshell bought the company in 1983 and operated it until his death in 1991. His daughter, Beri Fox, now serves as president.
If playing for keepsies seems like a blast from the past, marble making is still done the old way, too. It works like this: four and one-half tons of recycled glass is melted everyday in firebrick furnaces heated to 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit.
Ninety percent of the marbles at Marble King are made from post-consumer glass, including perfume bottles, beer bottles, glassware and canning jars, or from “seconds,” imperfect knick-knacks provided by factories that manufacture glass.
A mixture of sand, soda ash and feldspar is used to make virgin glass when recycled glass is not available, or when color certainty can only be achieved with a glass formula. The molten glass is then poured through a funnel into a grooved, rolling machine that shapes and smoothes the circular glass orbs. Other designs, like the popular Cat’s Eye, are created when a second color is added. A sorting machine dispenses the hot marbles by size into buckets where, after cooling, they are hand-checked for quality by one of 38 full-time employees.
Marble King creates marbles in equal measures for three markets: toy and game, decorative and floral, and industrial. It sells directly to wholesalers, retail distributors, mom and pop shops, stores that specialize in traditional toys and Americana, older general stores and antique shops. Many old-time general stores still offer those big barrels of marbles so irresistible to children. Industrial applications of marbles include placement in paint cans to keep the solid and liquid combined (unlike metal, glass marbles don’t rust or corrode), as rollers to keep printing presses running and for moving coffins into mausoleums.