Paperweight maker Victor Trabucco discusses the history of the vacuum pump. Oral history interview with Victor Trabucco by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, September 16, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:37.

Victor Trabucco: Okay, let me give you a little bit of the history of the vacuum. All right, now, I didn’t invent it. I think it really came from the scientific community. Probably all the way back to even a guy like Harold Hacker, he—cause he did scientific glass, and that’s where they actually use those vacuum pumps. So when they were making the scientific glass. So that’s where we feel that it came from. Nobody knows exactly who first started using it in paperweights. And it’s sometimes hard to tell, unless the weights are more—the early paperweights weren’t that complicated, so it’s hard to tell if they did use a vacuum or not, and depending on the type of glass that they use, if it was soft enough it would flow around. Cause, you know, all the antique French weights, like the Pantin lizards and all that, were very dimensional. And of course, they didn’t have a vacuum in those days. So it’s just by looking at things it’s hard to tell, but if the weight is more complicated, you know, I can certainly decide—I can probably make an estimated guess that if they used a vacuum or not. And then over the years, I mean, they—at one point it was a very guarded secret. And some people now I see they even advertise, like, ‘It is a vacuum encased paperweight,’ which is so silly to say that, I think. It gives you some advantage, but the real art is how you construct the paperweights, the temperatures and things like that.