After a glass cylinder was removed from the blowpipe in the Melting Furnace, it was placed on a wooden rack and a molten glass strip was wrapped around each end. When the domed top and end were touched with a piece of wet metal, they snapped off cleanly. A heated rod was then run down the length of the cylinder until it made a groove, and when the cylinder was touched with a piece of wet metal it split along the groove. The split cylinders were stored on wooden racks until needed in the Flattening House, where each one was placed on a smooth rotating stone of fired clay, reheated until it unfolded, and smothered with a block of wood until it became a flat rectangle. It was then lifted with a long-pronged fork and placed on a car at the mouth of the annealing oven, or lehr, a long low rectangular chamber that was intensely hot near the oven and cooler at the far end, allowing the glass to cool in a controlled way that left it free of built-in stress. In the Cutting House, 32” by 40” glass sheets were cut into window panes by cutters, the highest-paid and highest-status glasshouse workers, whose skill was valued because poor cutting could waste large amounts of glass and one cutter could keep pace with the output of several glassblowers. Very little was wasted in the manufacturing process: broken glass called cutlet was remelted as part of the batch, ash from the furnace was recycled as a raw material, and even the caps removed from the ends of the cylinders were reused as glass bells for displaying wax fruit.