Glassblowing with Paul Le Pinnet

Award-winning glassblower Paul Le Pinnet, renowned for skilfully moulding molten glass into intricate shapes for cutting-edge lab experiments, has been honoured for his work. Scientific glassblowing is highly specialised and Paul is one of only 200 in the country to possess the skills to create intricate and precise glassware vessels for research scientists.

Paul – who has been a glassblower for more than 45 years – is the Chief Scientific Glassblower at SOG Ltd and was made a Fellow of The British Society of Scientific Glassblowers for services and commitment to the organisation and the glassblowing community last year.

We caught up with Paul to find out more about the award, and some of the weird and wonderful shapes he’s been asked to blow.

How does it feel to be honoured with the title of Fellow of The British Society of Scientific Glassblowers? I am obviously immensely proud. It is the first time the award has been made and when I received the letter informing me it came totally out of the blue. I felt very, very pleased, humbled and honoured. To be made a Fellow by the Society and get a pat on the back from my peers made me feel quite emotional.

How did you get into glassblowing? I was a trainee chemist and obviously I came into contact with a great deal of glass. A fair amount gets broken until you get used to handling the glassware – I broke so many glass vessels that the resident glassblower got fed up and said if you’re going to break the glass you may as well learn how to mend it! He taught me how to manipulate glass and I just loved it. I was completely and utterly fascinated. I discovered I was better at glassblowing than being a chemist and jumped ship. I got a job at the University of Manchester where I trained as a glass blower for seven years. It takes that long to become proficient.

What does a typical day involve? There is no such thing as a typical day. I spend my days playing with glass and bending it into strange shapes to create unique pieces which enable chemists, physicists, and biochemists to carry out vital research. It is challenging and enormously rewarding. To be able to translate the needs of a scientist and become a part of the research community is exhilarating. Ideas come to me in the form of a sketch or computerised drawing but on the odd occasion I have had it arrive scribbled on the back of a cigarette packet!

I like to get in early, at about 7.30am when it is quiet and cool and I can think quietly. Because the flame temperatures are so high it causes great stress on the glass and everything has to be put into an annealing oven at temperatures of up to 680°C overnight. I empty the ovens in the morning and allow the glass to cool. Sometimes something I have made will have shattered overnight and I will have to start again.

I check all of the items under a polarised light for cracks or stress and to ensure the thicknesses are accurate. I have to be sure that they will be safe for the end user. I have customers all over the world and I obviously need to establish exactly what temperatures the things I make will have to stand and what chemicals will go into them.

Yesterday I made half of a jacketed vessel which I took out of the oven this morning and today I will complete it. Someone here at The Heath popped in early and asked me to make him ten glass valves for the base of a reactor. I will make them today, put them in the oven overnight and he should be able to have them tomorrow.

I have taken two valves out of the oven this morning that will be shipped to a customer in America. I also have a chap from Wakefield coming to see me today. He works for an environmental company taking samples at various different sites. He contacted me two weeks ago to see if I could make special vessels for collecting the samples, and he is coming to take delivery of them.

Every single day is different. Moulding molten glass into something new that can help with vital research is a wonderful feeling. Each day is exciting, every job is unique and each new piece I create with my bare hands teaches me something different and this helps me raise my game.

What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever been asked to mould? When I was working at Manchester University I was asked to make a glass whelk shell. They were looking at hermit crabs which as you know don’t have a shell of their own. We put the glass shell into the tank and the little naked hermit crab squeezed his body into it and made it his home. The advantage of glass is that you can see everything that is going on through it. Watching the hermit crab running around the tank squashed into the whelk shell was quite funny.

What piece have you been most proud of? In 1983 I won the Norman Collins Award for making an ebulliometer – a multi-layered vessel used in the late 1930s to accurately measure the boiling point of liquids by measuring temperature of the vapour. I found a mass of broken bits in a cupboard when I worked at ICI along with an old drawing and it looked like a challenge to recreate it. The glass flowed perfectly and it worked really well. The creation is now a test piece for a Master glassblower.

I was particularly proud of winning this award as Norman Collins was my inspiration as a young glassblower. I knew him when he was at the Faculty of Science at Liverpool University and not only was he an extremely nice person he was an extraordinarily talented glassblower. He taught me to strive for the best standards possible in every piece that I made.

• For further information on SOG’s glassblowing services visit: www.scientificglassblowing.co.uk