Thread: Escher loved natural combos!

I recently met a guy in the thuringian area whose grandfather once worked as the last blaster for the JGES company in the thuringian whetstone quarries.

I got a lot of information and also gained some material from the legacy of the Escher company.

One very interesting issue in the context of how the best stones for producing high quality hones were selected from JGES company is, that the workers were admonished to find, mine and select especially natural combination stones.

These stones often were sold and mainly exported under the name barbers delight.

In fact this seemed to be an Escher specialty because up today I have not seen such a combo from the other thuringian whetstone companies –even though they surely do exist because the stones often come from the same quarries.

So the pictures you will see in the following show the material as it was found and mined in the thuringian slate mountains. Mostly these are tail cuts of the large stones the famous Escher hones were cut from.







Looking at the exterior shell of the slate stones the different colors are sometimes not visible. The combination gets visible after the stone had been cut. To select those stones in the quarries - if not the different layers were directly cut during mining - must have presumed a lot of experience from the miners in the past.






Sometimes the layers and especially the yellow/ yellow green ones have been very thin. Here you see a couple of three colored stones were the yellow green layers is only about a quarter of an inch or 5 mm thick and packed between two blue layers.






Some more pictures for all Escher and Thuringian lovers – enjoy!