Porcelain’s unique allure through the ages has elicited reactions from rapture to duplicity. William Tucker of Philadelphia, for example, was very proud of his “China Factory.” It was America’s first successfully sustained porcelain effort.
Tucker began in 1825, as Barber recounts, “with no previous knowledge of the composition of the ware…[he] set to work, wholly unaided by the practical experience of others. He succeeded in a few years in perfecting from new and untried materials a porcelain equal in all respects to the best which England had produced after 80 years of continual experiment.”
Not bad. The China Factory was a “must see” stop on visitors’ itinerary for Philadelphia. Tucker even won medals in 1827 from the Franklin Institute and in 1831 from the American Institute.
William Tucker lobbied President Andrew Jackson for tariffs on rival European porcelain makers. Henry Clay argued William’s bill in the senate. The bill failed. But that turned out to be the least of William’s woes.
There was a particularly nasty stretch where nothing went right. Glazes shivered. Bodies bloated. Pots melted onto shelves. Handles fell off. Entire kiln loads wasted. Any potter who has experienced this peculiar form of hell (or is living it right now) knows the desperation heard in William’s “Why me?”
A deaf and dumb employee supplied the answer. As William’s brother Thomas related:
“We discovered that we had a man who placed the ware in the kiln who was employed by some interested parties in England to impede our success. Most of the handles were found in the bottom of the saggars after the kiln was burned. [The] deaf-dumb man in our employment detected him running his knife around each handle as he placed them in the kiln. At another time, every piece of china had to be broken before it could be taken out of a saggar. We always washed the round O’s, the article in which the china was placed in the kiln, with silex; but this man had washed them with feldspar, which of course, melted, and fastened every article to the bottom. But William discharged him and we got over that difficulty.”
Porcelain’s allure eventually scaled back to that of a more personal aesthetic appeal. It should today be unthinkable to consider sabotaging any poor potter’s business – porcelain or not. After all, we’re just potters. Why pick on us?
Peace on Earth. Happy New Year.
Readings:
The Pottery and Porcelain of the United States. Edwin Atlee Barber. G.P. Putnam’s Sons/New York. 1909.
American Potters and Pottery. John Ramsey. 1939. Colonial Press/Clinton, MA.
This Day in Pottery History 