How marbles are made

March 30, 2022 9:16 PM

The Incredible Satisfying Birth of a Marble: MetaFilter’s own Andy Baio falls down a rabbit-hole of marble factory videos and marble contraptions.
posted by mbrubeck (17 comments total)

Ahhhhhhhh! This makes me so, so happy, from that first TikTok to the student shoveling snow with a coal scoop and cooking what looks like a delicious freaking meal to the Picture Picture reference (#oddlysatisfying content always makes me think of Picture Picture) to the heartbreaking twist at the end. WHY, BLOCKCHAIN, WHY
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 10:29 PM on March 30, 2022 [4 favorites]

The whole Twitter thread was a delight! Especially the Mr. Rogers clip.
posted by armeowda at 10:49 PM on March 30, 2022 [1 favorite]

Ahhhh yes this is indeed supremely satisfying. Thank you so much. I needed this.
posted by Joey Michaels at 12:13 AM on March 31, 2022

...the heartbreaking twist at the end.

For another one of those: there was to have been a sequel to the Marble Madness arcade game, and it was ready for production but Atari scrapped it because fighting games were the new hotness.

I fondly remember Marble Madness, its graphics and soundtrack, as the coolest thing from that era of video games. And Stemage has a rockin' cover of the music from the game.
posted by Foosnark at 4:23 AM on March 31, 2022 [3 favorites]

Similarly, shot towers have a long history for making lead shot and musket balls. Dissimilarly, if 18th century you didn't have a shot tower, you could make musket balls by the camp fire.
posted by BWA at 5:13 AM on March 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

Back when Mrs. Dewd was doing craft shows, we would sometimes hang out with The Marble Man (and the Marble Ma'am).
I was under the impression that he made his own marbles, but that isn't mentioned in the video. He told me about the screws in those videos.
They sold marbles at 10 for a dollar, so they had to transport hundreds of pounds of marbles around the east coast, and I imagine the profit margin is thin.
I guess the money's in the boards, not the marbles.
posted by MtDewd at 5:46 AM on March 31, 2022

I love this! I wanted to get Small Rattery some cool marbles for Christmas but could not for the life of me figure out where to buy cool "collecting" marbles any more.
posted by Mrs. Rattery at 5:51 AM on March 31, 2022

I love posts that are about something I didn't know I wanted to know but which it turns out, I have definitely always wanted to know.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:27 AM on March 31, 2022 [2 favorites]

Similarly, shot towers have a long history for making lead shot and musket balls

At least one of the workers had some kind of mask on. I can only imagine the health consequences of working there.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:35 AM on March 31, 2022 [3 favorites]

I love marbles. About fifteen years ago, I began collecting marbles that I’d found on the ground (I’ve found them in the dirt all over the place, but most are from working in secondhand stores, where marbles fall out of games and roll around endlessly in back rooms). I have several hundred marbles. I color sort them and keep them in jars as decoration, or in the bottom of my moss ball aquariums. I have a few handmade stone marbles that were my great grandfather’s. It’s in my list of Things To Make to make my own out of local creek rocks. I want to go witness the Rolley Hole championship in the fall at Standing Stone park (a mere 2 hr drive from my house). This was a nice post to read this morning!
posted by oomny at 7:21 AM on March 31, 2022 [4 favorites]

greenland jr is currently obsessed with marble run videos and this is wonderful. Thank you, Andy and mbrubeck!
posted by greenland at 7:35 AM on March 31, 2022

Oh also, here’s a great channel on how to make rock marbles!
posted by oomny at 7:43 AM on March 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

My city has a glass arts center where you can learn how to make all sorts of things. A few years ago I signed up to take a workshop on how to hand-make marbles at the flame studio. We used rods of the same kind of glass that went into classic, indestructible pyrex back in the day. A lot like the video, we used gravity and constant rotation to shape the rods of colored glass into orbs of glowing magma, but it was all done by hand. I made a marble that matched one I'd had as a little kid, clear, but filled with loops of red, blue and yellow.

It took so much concentration to make the perfectly round ball that I scarcely had time to be terrified of the extreme temperatures I was working with, lest I burn the crap out of myself. It wasn't until 20 minutes after my class, with my finished marbles cooling off in the kiln that I was hit with a wall of adrenaline while grocery shopping. It was like my body had stored up all that terror and then released it when it knew I was safe. I'm sure I looked like a person suddenly overcome by all the pasta choices.

I wouldn't mind doing it again, to be honest. I really liked my marble.
posted by Alison at 10:24 AM on March 31, 2022 [11 favorites]

I hope I never get tired of watching marble runs. It's just so soothing yet engaging. I know I developed my love based on a kinetic sculpture clock my dad had (which actually used ball bearings, but same principle). I always coveted that clock.

Thanks for the videos! Made my lunch fly by.
posted by Eideteker at 11:00 AM on March 31, 2022

Oh, I almost missed the Marble Madness II link! I loved the original when it came out; probably my first instance of thinking a game was made just for me and my weird interests.
posted by Eideteker at 11:11 AM on March 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

Thanks for posting this! Marbles bring back so many good memories for me. My grandparents lived down the street from the marble factory in Paden City, WV. Discarded or irregular marbles were so common that people would use them with fill dirt. There are still places there where marbles wash out of the hills and there are marble hunters who have found valuable ones in those spots. When I was a kid in the 80’s, we would spend afternoons going to these random spots around town, filling buckets with marbles, and using them as our own form of currency.

I’ve talked with friends about going back to Paden City to look for marbles, and this post has added that back on my to-do list.
posted by August Fury at 1:42 PM on March 31, 2022 [2 favorites]

Metafilter: overcome by all the pasta choices
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:06 PM on March 31, 2022 [1 favorite]