cranberry glass

[surshot]

Hi all back in the early 80's my wife worked for a tourist trap in Fla. that sold crystal,scpulture and the like ,all high end stuff. One of the items was cranberry glass. It was supposed to have gold dust added to the glass to get the color, the more gold the deeper the cranberry color. Does anyone know if this is true? and if so how would one recover the gold? thanks Ed

 

[Harold_V]

Gold chloride was used, not gold dust. I expect that that is no longer the case. Gold was used long ago, before other means to color the glass were discovered. I doubt you have any that contains gold. Such pieces are generally considered collectable, and have value well beyond that of the gold contained within. (My wife is a collector of art glass).

Harold

 

[glassmaker]

Harold is essentially right, "cranberry" glass (i.e., gold ruby) is/was made with gold chloride, not gold powder. (Some people also refer to selenium ruby and copper ruby as "cranberry glass". Neither of these contains any gold.)

Some gold ruby glass is still made today, primarily in the art glass field. Regardless, it would not be worth trying to recover gold from this glass. The cost of recovery would FAR exceed the value of gold recovered. It takes approximately 10 -100 ppm of gold to impart a ruby color to glass. So even if the refining could be done for free with free materials at a recovery rate of 100 percent, one would need 100KG of gold ruby glass in order to get 1-10 gm of gold. This is pretty unlikely to be cost effective when factoring in the price of the glass, energy costs for melting, price of a furnace and crucible for melting the glass, and the actual percentage of gold likely to be recovered.

Brad

 

[Palladium]

Welcome to the forum Brad.

 

[glassmaker]

Welcome to the forum Brad.

Thanks. It looks like a valuable resource. I'm glad I found it.