Chance Brothers illuminating the world - appearing last night in Birmingham, UK

Publisher of History West Midlands magazine, Mike Gibbs has a passion for the Black Country, an area centred on Wolverhampton, Dudley and Smethwick a few miles west of Birmingham in the UK. He was born and bred there and apart from a few years in South Africa has lived there all his life.

A successful and now retired businessman, he devotes most of his time to establishing and supporting ventures which aim to uncover the rich history of this part of Britain, which was the crucible of the Industrial Revolution and home to many famous inventors and industrial dynasties.

One of these dynasties was the Chance family, who from the 1770s built a trading then a manufacturing business of considerable scale which for five generations led Britain's glassmaking industry. At its height in the early 20th century the firm employed over 3 500 people. The factory finally closed its doors in 1981.

Last night I was the main speaker at an event organised by the magazine, and around 80 people came along to hear me speak about Chance Brothers' pioneering work in lighthouse lens manufacture. Between 1851 and the 1970s the firm manufactured over 2 500 lenses of all shapes and sizes which were installed in some 90 countries worldwide, including South Africa.

The brains behind the lighthouse business was Sir James Chance, my great great grandfather - pictured above on the engraved ruby glass plate produced to celebrate the centenary of the founding of the lighthouse works.

The other speakers were Dr Malcolm Dick, Director of the Centre for West Midlands History, and Dr Janet Sullivan, both at the University of Birmingham.

Malcolm spoke first and set the context for my talk with portrayals of the Black Country - Black by Day, Red by Night - by painters and artists including JMW Turner and Mervyn Peake. This part of Britain epitomised William Blake's "dark satanic mills" which bellowed smoke and flame as they turned out the raw materials  securing Britain's industrial supremacy.

Janet, in complete contrast, described the Chance family's commitment to their workers and their families, through investments in schools, a provident fund, a convalescent home, recreational parks, a gymnasium, churches and countless events and celebrations of workers' contributions to the firm's success.

Afterwards I met Valerie Martin, who gave me an incredible piece of information: one or other member of her family had worked for Chance continuously from the 1790s in Nailsea near Bristol, at their first glassworks run with the Homer and Lucas families, until the Chance factory (then part of the Pilkington Group) closed in 1981 - nearly two hundred years! This is an extreme example of what was commonplace at Chance Brothers - multiple generations of the same family working for the firm. Something to be proud of.

In my talk, I drew on the article I wrote for the magazine last year summarising the firm's major achievements, including glazing the Crystal Palace which housed the 1851 Great Exhibition, glazing the Houses of Parliament and the clock face of Big Ben, inventing fibre glass and light-sensitive glass, pioneering the manufacture of cathode ray tubes and many other things.

Elihu Burritt, US Consul in Birmingham in the mid-19th century, gave a detailed description of the Chance glassworks in his book Walks in the Black Country published in 1868: "In no other establishment in the world can one get such a full idea of the infinite uses which glass is made to serve as in these immense works."

To be continued....