Figure 29 is a laboratory beaker of a type manufactured in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, probably a relic of William
and Susan Middleton’s inventor son Henry. It is free-blown in lead
glass, one of many glass compositions used for American laboratory
equipment before Corning Glass Works introduced low-expansion Pyrex
glass in 1915.
[Illustration: Figure 29. Free-blown laboratory beaker, probably
late 19th or early 20th century.]
Henry lived at Middleton Place with his parents until the 1870s, when he
went to study at Cambridge University under the Scottish physicist James
Clerk Maxwell. Henry lived in England until his death in 1932.