Chance Brothers

• 1. Introduction

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  Chance Brothers and Company stood at Spon Lane in Smethwick, a stretch of the West Midlands wedged between Birmingham and the Black Country, and for nearly two centuries it shaped how the world saw the light. Its glass covered the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851. Its lenses guided ships safely into port on every ocean. Its tubes helped Britain detect enemy aircraft in World War II. The questions worth asking about Chance Brothers are not simply what it made, but how a family of Worcestershire farmers turned a struggling glassworks into what one visiting American called the most complete demonstration of the infinite uses of glass in the world.

• 2. The Family Behind the Glass

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  Robert Lucas Chance, known to everyone as Lucas, was born on the 8th of October 1782 and spent his early life far from any furnace. His family had their roots in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, where they worked as farmers and craftsmen. In November 1822, Lucas bought the British Crown Glass Company's works at Spon Lane, a site whose position between canal lines and skilled industrial labour made it a practical choice for anyone who wanted to grow fast.

  The venture nearly collapsed within a decade. By 1832, the business was in serious difficulty, and rescue came from Lucas's brother William, born on the 29th of August 1788, who ran an iron factoring operation on Great Charles Street in Birmingham. William's investment saved the firm. After a partnership with the Hartley Brothers ended in 1836, the two brothers formalized their joint ownership and renamed the company Chance Brothers and Company.

  A third figure completed the founding generation. James Timmins Chance, born on the 22nd of March 1814, was a grandson of William Chance, who had first set up the family in business in 1771. James patented a new process to grind the surfaces of plate glass in 1839, and he would guide the company for decades before retiring in 1889, when the firm became a public company. In 1900, a baronetcy was created in his name; he died on the 6th of January 1902 as the first Chance baronet.

• 3. Glass for the World

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  In 1832, Chance Brothers became the first British company to produce cylinder blown sheet glass, a process they carried out using French and Belgian workers brought in specifically for the work. The cylinder method made Chance the largest British manufacturer of window and plate glass, and the company earned a reputation as the greatest glass manufacturer in Britain.

  The commission that fixed Chance Brothers in public memory arrived in 1851. Joseph Paxton had already refined his glasshouse techniques on an order for a large greenhouse on the Chatsworth estate of the Dukes of Devonshire. That earlier challenge had pushed Chance to produce very long pieces of window glass around 1848, and the solution gave Paxton what he needed to design the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition. The glazing contract went to Chance Brothers, and the project earned Paxton a knighthood.

  Other commissions followed in close succession. Chance Brothers glazed the Houses of Parliament, built between 1840 and 1860, and supplied the opal glass for the four clock faces of the Westminster Clock Tower, the tower that houses the bell known as Big Ben. At that time, no other British firm could produce opal glass of the required specification. The ornamental windows for the White House in Washington were made at Smethwick as well. The American philanthropist and social activist Elihu Burritt, who lived from 1810 to 1879, visited and said: "In no other establishment in the world can one get such a full idea of the infinite uses which glass is made to serve as in these immense works."

• 4. Lighthouse Optics

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  In 1848, a French glassmaker named Georges Bontemps arrived at Spon Lane carrying something valuable. Bontemps came from Choisy-le-Roi and had purchased the secret of the stirrer after the deaths of Pierre Louis Guinand and Joseph von Fraunhofer, the men who had pioneered precision lenses for observatory telescopes. He agreed to share the secret with Chance Brothers and stayed in England to collaborate for six years.

  From 1851, the knowledge Bontemps brought transformed Chance Brothers into a major lighthouse engineering company. James Timmins Chance pioneered the design of placing lighthouse lamps inside a cage surrounded by Fresnel lenses, greatly increasing light output. These cages, called optics, changed how lighthouses were built around the world.

  The physicist and engineer John Hopkinson, while working at Chance Brothers, devised the rotating optics system. His invention allowed adjacent lighthouses to flash at different rates, so that sailors could tell them apart simply by counting the flashes per revolution. Only three other companies in Britain made comparable precision glass: Pilkington of St Helens, Hartleys of Sunderland, and Cooksons of Newcastle.

  Chance also made a 24-inch, or 62-centimetre, flint glass lens for the Craig telescope, a very large lens for its day. Bontemps assisted on that project as well, though Chance Brothers made only one part of the doublet lens; the Thames Plate Glass Company produced the other half.

• 5. War Production and Radar

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  Before the outbreak of World War II, Chance Brothers had already developed cathode-ray tubes using Hysil glass, a borosilicate glass similar in composition to Pyrex. When war came, those tubes found an urgent military purpose: radar detection displays. At peak production, the Smethwick works was turning out up to 7,000 cathode-ray tubes per week.

  The scale of that work caught the attention of the War Artists' Advisory Committee. In 1943, the artist Mervyn Peake was commissioned by the committee to paint pictures recording the production at Chance Brothers. The company had also expanded significantly in partnership with the Ministry of Munitions' Optical Munitions and Glass Department during World War I, establishing a pattern of wartime public collaboration.

  Earlier in the 20th century, the company had found other uses for its precision glass. In 1933, reports surfaced that Chance Brothers was involved in an attempt to contact any intelligent life on Mars, using adapted lighthouse optics mounted on the Jungfrau, a mountaintop in Switzerland. Whether the attempt succeeded in reaching across space is not recorded, but it illustrated how far the company's optical expertise had travelled from its origins in crown window glass.

• 6. Pilkington, Malvern, and Survival

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  Pilkington Brothers took a 50 percent shareholding in Chance Brothers in 1945, though the Smethwick operation continued to be run largely on its own terms. A separate factory was established in Malvern, Worcestershire, in 1947, built specifically for laboratory glass. The Malvern plant marked itself early: in 1948 it produced the world's first interchangeable syringe.

  By the end of 1952, Pilkington had assumed full financial control, though active management intervention did not come until the mid to late 1960s. When plastic disposable syringes displaced glass versions in the late 1960s, Malvern shifted the range of its precision bore tubing into other markets. The company had already developed this tubing in the 1950s under the trade name Veridia.

  Flat glass production ceased at Smethwick in 1976, and the remaining works closed in 1981, ending more than 150 years of glass production at the original site. All flat glass production moved to Pilkington's St Helens factories. Glass tube processing, syringes, and laboratory glassware moved to Malvern. Then, in 1992, a management buy-out during a period of rationalisation at Pilkingtons returned the Malvern plant to private ownership. The company changed its registered name to Chance Glass Limited but kept the original Chance logo, and it continues to serve the pharmaceutical, chemical, metrology, electronics, and lighting industries from Malvern today.

• 7. What Remains

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  The original Spon Lane site sits between two historic canal routes, the Birmingham Canal Navigations Old Main Line and New Main Line, close to the Spon Lane locks. Several Grade II listed warehouses and adjacent canal bridges survive within the Smethwick Summit - Galton Valley Conservation Area.

  The archives of Chance Brothers Ltd are held at the Sandwell Community History and Archives Service. Additional papers rest at the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham. The Heritage Lottery Fund has sponsored a project examining the social and economic impact the company had on the region across its long life.

  In West Smethwick Park, a listed memorial to James Timmins Chance still stands, marking the man who patented the plate glass grinding process in 1839, guided the firm into public ownership, and received his baronetcy in the final years of Victoria's reign. The Chance Glass name and logo that survived the 1992 buy-out carry that same lineage forward from Bromsgrove farmers to a precision glassworks in Malvern.