Marbles
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a well known game for boys. The name is due possibly to the fact that the first marbles were made out of the stone known as marble. Some marbles are made of potter's clay. They are glazed and baked in an oven, like earthenware. One pottery in Ohio makes nothing else; 100,000 marbles are made daily. China marbles are made of porcelain clay. Glass marbles are formed usually by pressing molten glass into iron molds, or by gathering a small globule of molten glass on the end of a short rod and whirling it until it cools. Sometimes a china figure is affixed to the end of the rod before dipping into the molten glass. In this way the marble may be made to inclose any desired figure. The marbles known as agates are made chiefly at a town called Oberstein in Germany where labor is cheap. The workmen break the stone into small pieces and chip it nearly round with a hammer. They complete the process by grinding on an emery wheel and polishing. Such marbles are necessarily expensive. The world's supply of stone marbles comes chiefly from Germany. The workmen break the stone into cubes. A hundred of these are placed on a millstone, the surface of which is provided with a number of grooves. A second millstone of hard oak wood is let down upon the face. By causing these stones to whirl rapidly, the cubes are rolled and rounded and polished quickly into marbles. A current of water, fed through the center of the wooden mill, carries away the dust as fast as it is ground off. It also cools the mill and prevents undue heating. In Our Hundred Days in Europe, Holmes, describing his visit to Westminster Abbey , says: Amidst all the imposing recollections of the ancient edifice, one impressed me in the inverse ratio of its importance. The Archdeacon pointed out the little holes in the stones, in one place, where the boys of the choir used to play marbles, before America was discovered--centuries before, it may be. It is a strangely impressive glimpse of a living past, like the graffiti of Pompeii.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's account of 1910 caught the trade at its turning point: it still says "the world's supply of stone marbles comes chiefly from Germany," ground between millstones at places like Oberstein. Within a decade American automatic machinery — pioneered in Ohio, where M. F. Christensen patented a glass-marble machine in 1905 — had made cheap glass marbles by the million and the German stone industry effectively vanished; today most marbles come from Mexico and China, and factories on both continents have closed as the game itself faded from schoolyards after about 1960. Marbles now survive largely as a collectors' market, where handmade nineteenth-century German sulphides and swirls fetch far more than the "expensive" agates Aiton describes, and as organised sport, notably the British and World Marbles Championship played each Good Friday at Tinsley Green in Sussex. The one thing unchanged is Holmes's detail: the worn hollows in the stone at Westminster Abbey are still pointed out to visitors.
Written for this edition, 2026.