The Story of The Moser Glass Colors
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Even in the late 19th century colored glass didn't play as significant a role in Moser's product range as it does today. Ever since Ludwig Moser founded the glassworks in 1893, its main priority was mainly crystal glass. In Bohemian glassworks, the colorless, clear and hard potash glass was typically and traditionally used, as it was particularly suitable for processing and decoration through grinding and engraving.
Colored molten glass began to find prominence in Moser's production with the advent of the Art Nouveau style. Partially green, violet and sometimes orange, pink or blue layered vases and goblets created backgrounds for deeply engraved compositions of plant motifs. A substantial turn towards the use of colored glass, however, come after 1908, when Leo Moser took up the position of technical director. He experimented with melting copper colored ruby red glass, and in 1915 showcased the first collection of thick-walled heavy monochrome vases with regular facet cuts at the Modern Czech Glass exhibition in Prague. After 1915, he introduced basic glass colors into regular production, they are given attractive gem names - purple Ametyst, dark green Smaragd, brownish-yellow Topas and cobalt-blue Saphir. In 1923 he added the yellow-green Radion colored with uranium compounds and at the same time black Hyalith glass, though only in small amounts.
In 1927 Leo Moser's technological innovation and artistic sagacity, especially his effort to find a select and exclusive face for Moser's production, brought cooperation with Berlin's specialist in the area of chemical glass colors. The result of a two-year experiment, and a series of test smelts, were special, completely new types of molten glass colored with oxides of rare earths (neodymium, praseodymium). These have a surprising quality. Their color changes depending on artificial or daylight - Heliolit, changing from sandy yellow to green, purple-violet of Alexandrit and yellow-green of Prasemit. Moser first introduced cut glass vases with a distinct color play at the Spring Fair in Leipzig in 1929 and in the same year, their names were registered as trademarks. A year later Moser expanded the series with the purple-red Royalit and 1932 saw the entry of the golden-yellow Eldor. In the late 1920s, Moser also began to melt the blue-green colored Beryl.
Today the Moser Glassworks ties in to Leo Moser's extremely valuable legacy and purposefully develops it further, both in its use of high-quality ecologically friendly unleaded crystal with exceptional optical qualities, and in the exclusive glass color use in conjunction with unique, artistically progressive design by major artists.
