f the world were a duller place, all machine-made glass would look alike. It would, in fact, be made by machines from beginning to end, perhaps from a control room containing an array of push-buttons.
          However, thanks to geology, and the ingenuity of man, Kokomo Opalescent Glass is made with a bank of machinery on one hand and an eight-foot ladle in the other.
          This small company makes a product unlike anything else in the glass industry, and was willing, on a recent winter day, to demonstrate how they do it.
          The company owes its location to a gift from pre-history; a huge pocket of natural gas. Discovered in the 1850s, it ran all the way from Ohio to Howard County, Indiana, and under most of the town of Kokomo?a perfect source of fuel to power the glass furnaces.
          At the height of the Gas Boom, in the late 1800s, over 90 glass factories were turning out goblets, tumblers, and colored-glass 'collectibles.' But one company, known simply as 'The Opalescent Glass Works,' bet on one-of-a-kind sheets of art glass?and won. When the gas source dried up a few years later, taking the smaller companies with it, Kokomo Opalescent survived.
          The company was incorporated in 1888 as an unusual, though successful, tri-family enterprise. R. E. Hoss, J. W. Learner, and W. E. Blacklidge share Kokomo's original letterhead. Business grew quietly for the first century or so; gradually, hired managers took over the day-to-day operation of the company.
          Suddenly, in the late 1970's, the art glass market exploded. The Glass Boom mimicked the earlier Gas Boom.
          "Everybody wanted something in stained glass," says Richard Elliott, now president of KOG. "In the late '70s we couldn't make or ship the stuff fast enough. You could shoot a bullet through the warehouse from one end to the other and not hit a sheet of glass."
          To accommodate the burgeoning demand, the company decided to jump into a rather expensive expansion project?a $1.1 million, circular 12-pot furnace, built by the English firm of Sismey & Linforth.
          But other manufacturers had the same idea, and leaped simultaneously into the market gap. Half a dozen new opalescent glass factories appeared on the scene, virtually overnight.