— Welch’s Floating Opal —
by Meg Andrews
COPYRIGHT© 2010-2025 MEG ANDREWS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
I have vivid
childhood memories of looking through my mother’s jewelry box and being
transfixed by her floating opal earrings. Time seemed to stand still as I
turned them over and over to see their fascinating displays of color and motion.
Recently, after purchasing an enchanting double floating opal necklace, I found
myself transfixed once again. And I began to wonder: who had created such an
intriguing and unusual form of jewelry, and when was it first made? Little did
I know that finding the answers to those simple questions would take months of
research, and would lead to the discovery of a quite remarkable and nearly
forgotten story.
Appearing much
like a miniature snow globe, the floating opal is essentially comprised of
small chips of opal encased in a liquid-filled glass orb. Although floating opals are still manufactured today, the jewelry we recognize as vintage reached
the peak of its demand in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. Floating opal jewelry, in the form of pendant necklaces and earrings, was enormously popular during that period and was manufactured by innumerable companies. Surprisingly though, it was
decades earlier that the floating opal was first introduced. And
remarkably, its inventor was not a jeweler, but a 50-year-old,
Stanford-educated, patent-holding mechanical engineer. Beginning
in 1920, in a venture that would take him through the rest of his life, Horace
H. Welch patented, perfected, manufactured, and marketed his
invention—transforming it, and himself, along the way.
Horace H. Welch: Mechanical Engineer/Inventor
One has to wonder
what would prompt a man, whose previous patents included carburetors,
speedometers, fuel indicators, an early car alarm, and a mechanical pencil, to
invent and patent a process for manufacturing jewelry. Was it a mid-life
crisis? Was it a woman? The truth is that we may never know. What is known is
that within two years of receiving his first patent for what would become the
floating opal, Horace Welch left a seemingly successful career in Chicago and moved to
New York City to begin manufacturing and selling his “Gem.”
Horace Herbert
Welch was born in 1871, the second son of a country doctor, in La Cygne,
Kansas. Census data show the family living in Kansas through the year 1885, but by 1900, much of his family had moved to Los Angeles, California. Within that time frame, Horace attended Harvard University for a year (1892-93) and graduated from Leland
Stanford Junior University (1897) with an A.B. degree in physics. Little is
known of him from that time until August of 1910, when at the age of 39, he
filed for his first patent. In that application for the patent of a ”Speed Indicator,” Welch acted as assignor to the Stewart-Warner Speedometer Corporation of Chicago. In the following years
through 1920, Welch applied for no less than thirteen1 mechanical and electrical
patents from various locations including Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and
Milwaukee.
That Horace was an
intelligent man is without question. One has only to read the multitudinous
pages of his 24 known patents to observe his quite brilliant and meticulous
mind. His dramatic pen style revealed also a great capacity for showmanship and
promotion — qualities that would serve him well in the jewelry industry. Because
he never married and lived so far away from his California relatives, living
family members know little of him but do report that the family considered him eccentric.
Welch’s Patents:
The Development of The Floating Opal
For an accurate timeline of the development of “The Floating Opal,” it is best to look at the patents2 in the order that they were filed rather than when they were
issued. (See chart.) Welch’s first application for what would become the floating opal was
filed in January of 1921, and was entitled simply …“Gem.” It was approved
swiftly by U.S. patent standards in June of 1922 and given the number 1,421,329.
The patent was very
general in nature and consisted of a single page of drawings and only two and a half
pages of description. In flowery language, Welch wrote that his invention
pertained “to a novel and pleasing type of gem or jewel adapted for many and
varied uses, particularly in the production of jewelry.” He mentioned opals
only in passing, and described instead that the shell could be filled loosely
with “the well-known sparkling granular ‘metallics’ of the trade,
or...crumpled pieces of gold leaf, tinsel or the like.” He stated that the
jewelry could be made with or without liquid using a single loose gem or a
number of display elements, and he included the rather impractical examples of
a ring and a strand of beads.
Even before that
first patent was granted, a May 1922 publication of The Stanford Illustrated Review
noted its alumnus as follows:
’97-Horace H. Welch, mechanical engineer, originally of Los
Angeles, and for the last few years of Chicago,
has invented and patented more
than twenty mechanical devices for electrical and other machinery.
One of his
latest inventions is a heavy colorless liquid in a tiny glass globe holding
minute bits of
colorful opal to be used for cheap rings and necklace
pendants.
There, for the first time, was the commitment to opals and necklace pendants. Sometime in the
year and a half between his patent application and that publication, Horace’s
tinsel-filled novelty had made the leap toward becoming a floating opal. Just
how he came to conclude that opal fragments should be the display elements is
hard to guess. It is likely that he was searching for something attractive yet inexpensive, as his goal was to produce a new and cheaper form of “high-grade” jewelry. The opal, with its history of being both prized and shunned, was
enjoying a new wave of popularity, and owing to its fragility, fragments were “common and of low cost.” Whatever it was that led Horace to the opal, his
subsequent applications show a definite shift in focus and a significant
concentration on displaying the opal’s colors most advantageously.
Apparently, there were initial production problems related to the gem’s fragility and its tendency to
break. In August and November of 1924, Welch filed his second and third patent
applications, in which he det...
