Lynnteresting!

Little-known, interesting tidbits about this great city’s amazing history.

Getting Blue in Lynn

Each time you get to enter an older Lynn home, look at the windows. There’s a good chance you will see some set with a pane or two of blue glass. The decision to add blue had little to do with interior decoration but everything to do with disease and sickness.

Blue glass has been made and appreciated since antiquity; it became associated with prosperity as well as health, having long been suspected of possessing some healing properties. Dark blue spectacles were considered the most effective for those with extremely light-sensitive eyes and was sometimes prescribed to people who had been bled, the blue light somehow calming and subduing the disorienting feelings of dizziness and weakness that can come from blood loss.

In 1876 a lawyer and militia officer in Pennsylvania named Augustus J. Pleasonton published a book about the curative qualities of rays of light passing through blue glass. He explained that he had done experiments on growing grapes in his greenhouse and found that when some panes of blue glass were installed, the vines grew longer and healthier and the grapes were more abundant. He then set blue glass into the roof of a pig sty and witnessed the pigs getting bigger and fatter than usual. The same thing happened with a cow that gave more milk and a mule that was cured of rheumatism and deafness. Even a canary got stronger and sang better when its cage was put in front of a blue glass window.  Experimenting with humans was the obvious next step, which Pleasonton claimed to do with equal success to the animals. A weak and puny newborn weighing just three and a half pounds at birth was put into a room that had blue curtains in the windows. After two months, the baby weighed in at twenty-four pounds! Other patients were cured of nervousness, exhaustion, and spinal meningitis, and the amazing blue light was even credited with growing hair on bald heads.

By 1877 much of the country was immersed in blue glass mania and Lynn was no exception. Lynn historian James Newhall tells us that many Lynn homes and greenhouses had a few “life-giving” blue panes set in the windows. Lynn glaziers were very busy and peddlers went from door to door selling blue glass. Window curtains were made of blue fabric and the world of women’s fashions was all aflutter with blue tints: hats and veils floated over stylish ladies in blue hues, sometimes even accented with a bird taxidermied to appear in flight upon a swatch of blue fabric sky.

Any way that light would touch the human body now had blue filters to transform the beams into healing rays. Blue chimney sconces could be purchased for kerosene lamps. Blue parasols complemented the fashionista’s blue ensembles. James Pike even sold “Blue Glass” brand cigars for a pricey twenty-five cents at his cigar and periodical store on Munroe Street. J. G. Olin, a jeweler and optician on Market Street, offered tinted spectacles for tired, smarting eyes. The Lynn Record reported that a young lady of West Lynn who had been an invalid for several years was greatly benefitted by trying the blue glass remedy.

Blue glass was also used to make blue bottles, which, it was believed, would impart improved health benefits to the product inside. Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound was originally bottled in glass of an icy blue color and even the paper label was cornflower blue. This earliest version of Pinkham bottling may indeed have been because Lydia was one of the many who believed in the power of blue. She recorded in her personal notebook instructions for making another cure for the “summer complaint,” which was the term for profuse diarrhea that afflicted especially young children, from infancy to a few years old. Lydia noted, “Summer complaint can be cured by exposing water in a blue bottle to the sun for a half hour or upward and then giving one or two teaspoonfuls each hour until symptoms change.” Water thus exposed to sunlight through blue glass, she further noted, reduced body heat, strengthened a weakened constitution, and most especially, diminished diarrhea.

The blue glass mania faded away as quickly as it had arrived and the glass used for Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound also changed in the blink of an eye, from icy blue to various shades of green and eventually to just plain clear. But some Lynn homes dating from 1877 or earlier still have panes of azure, beryl, cerulean, or cobalt, bearing silent witness to a time when blue colored sunshine with hope.

These are straight temple spectacles, circa 1830-1860. The lenses have no magnification; their only value was in their dark blue tint, a color that was used for protecting light-sensitive eyes plus to mitigate the dizziness and faintness some felt after being bled, a common practice by many doctors throughout the 19th century. Collection of Andre V. Rapoza

There are only a handful of the original Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound bottle with blue labels still in existence; this example at the Lynn Museum is the finest and earliest yet seen by the author of this article. Perhaps it was the first, being set aside much as small businesses do today with their first dollar earned. Collection of the Lynn Museum.

-- by Andrew V. Rapoza

Visit Andy’s blog for fascinating facts about 19^th and early 20^th century medical quackery in Lynn and elsewhere: http://quackcogitations.blogspot.com