“Predators will be drawn to the minnows in the glass traps and strike baits offered beside.”

Glass Station, in a converted gas station on Main Street in Wakefield, Rhode Island. He reminded me of the glass buoys made to suspend Pacific fishing nets, and shared tales of glassblowers occasionally finding employment a half-century ago on large commercial fishing boats, taking their skills to sea. Space is at a premium on fishing boats, and captains figured it was more efficient to feed a glassblower and store bags of soda lime, the principal ingredient in a common form of glass (including the form blown at the Glass Station), than to store stacks upon stacks of buoys.

Horton has a passion for glass bordering on religious. “I’ve always felt like a student in a temple,” he says of the artisan’s life he has chosen. He makes all manner of glass objects, sells his work widely, and is often commissioned for works of intricacy and sublime beauty. What I wanted was a tool, something that could be stuffed with chunks of clam or squid, tossed off a dock, and left overnight. This would not be for mantel display. It would be blue-collar glass for gathering meat, stored in a shed beside bucket, knife and gaff.

The first trap resembled a large glass bullet with an inverted funnel at its base; it was beautiful and looked sturdy, with thick, clear walls. Horton had attached a single glass loop to the exterior, midway down the side, from which the trap might be hung from dock or buoy, suspended in tide. We discussed this and thought that two loops might be better and make it easier to balance the trap in the water. We also thought the trap could use a vent hole, to release air when pushed underwater.

Horton and his partner, Jennifer Nauck, went to work. He retrieved a blowpipe from a warmer, scooped out a gather, centred it on the block, and then blew, inflating the gather to nearly double its size. By then the glass had cooled slightly, so he moved to a hotter furnace, maintained at 1 260 degrees, opened its circular door with a foot pedal, electrode with an oxy-propane torch and gently forced it through the side. The vent hole was in place. A fresh gather yielded two large drops of glass that he attached to the trap’s sides, stretched upward, snipped with shears, and then bent back down – forming loops on which the trap would hang. Last, he reheated the trap’s neck with the torch and pulled it off the pipe.

Although it looked ready, it was anything but. As it began to cool in the room-temperature air, it was vulnerable to thermal shock. And so Horton moved it to a third oven, which is maintained at 480 degrees during the day, but programmed to step down to room temperature overnight. Here the interior and exterior of the trap could cool at a gradual rate to relieve any stress on the glass. This reduces the risk of the trap shattering when bumped or subjected to changes in temperature, as a minnow trap dropped into the water would certainly be.

To test them, we sank the traps in the tidal salt flow of Point Judith Pond and found they worked, and sometimes worked very well. But our prototypes had flaws. They often held an air pocket, which

required repeated tilting to clear. And they released only a little scent and bait – enough when minnows were abundant to attract a fine catch, but not enough on leaner days to yield more than a few. Some days we had good harvests of grass shrimp (with which we caught porgies) and other days we caught silversides (useful for sea bass, flounder and chum). But we knew we could do better.

For the next version, Horton used a wider tungsten electrode to repeatedly puncture two opposing patches on the trap’s sides. These are intended to allow air to vent quickly as submerged, and then for water to flow through the trap, creating a plume of fish oil from the bait that we hoped would attract more minnows.

Meanwhile, we have been pointed to another potential use for the traps. Horton posted a photograph of a trap with a banner catch of silversides on Facebook. Dennis Zambrotta, a local surf fisherman, promptly recommended an old-school technique for using the glass traps to catch large fish. This required seeing the traps not as traps, but as lures. Fill them with live minnows, Zambrotta said, suspend them under the ice during winter, and hang live minnows on hooks nearby. Predators will be drawn to the minnows in the glass traps and strike baits offered beside. Zambrotta recalled reading of the idea in the 1970s in an outdoor magazine. If the lake out back freezes next winter, we’ll give that a try – another step in the step-by-step movement towards discovering a device from another time, and, with the help of an artisan, bringing it back.