Vaseline Glass Got Its Name From Somebody Else's Trademark

By Matthew Partsch - Owl and Twig Vintage - October 1, 2026

The glow is uranium, and American glassmakers were using it before 1890. The name is borrowed from a petroleum jelly trademark that Chesebrough Manufacturing Company never licensed to a single glass house.

Why uranium glass is called Vaseline glass

Robert Chesebrough patented petroleum jelly in 1872, under US Patent 127,568, writing in his own application that he had "invented a new and useful product from petroleum which I have named Vaseline." Chesebrough Manufacturing Company's surviving federal trademark registration for the name, No. 140,345, was registered in 1921, but its claimed first use in commerce reaches back to 1870, two years before the patent itself was filed. Neither document mentions glass. The jelly's own color at the time — a pale, slightly greenish yellow, more muted than the bright white the product is sold in today — is what collectors say the glass resembles closely enough to have borrowed the name.

No glass manufacturer licensed "Vaseline" from Chesebrough to describe its product, and Chesebrough does not appear to have objected. The nickname is informal, applied by sellers and collectors to a type of glass the trademark owner had nothing to do with making.

Collectors already had an older name for the color before any of those decades: "canary glass," attested by the 1840s, describes the same bright yellow uranium-colored glass without any trademark attached to it at all. "Vaseline glass" did not replace canary glass so much as narrow it — collectors now reserve "true" Vaseline glass for pieces that are both transparent and fluoresce green under ultraviolet light, a stricter definition covered below.

Where uranium glass actually came from

Martin Heinrich Klaproth identified uranium as an element in 1789, while analyzing pitchblende ore from the Habsburg silver mines at Joachimsthal, Bohemia — the same mines that had supplied local glassmakers with coloring agents since the late Middle Ages. Josef Riedel is credited as the first to turn that into a commercial glass product, working at his factory in Unter-Polaun, Bohemia, from 1830 to 1848. He named his yellow variety "Annagelb" and his yellow-green variety "Annagrun," both for his wife, Anna Maria.

European competitors followed within a decade. The Choisy-le-Roi factory in France was producing uranium glass by 1838; Baccarat entered the market in 1843 with an opaque green version it called chrysoprase, alongside its own transparent "cristal dichroide." James Powell's Whitefriars Glass Company in London was among the first to sell uranium glass commercially in Britain. By the time American manufacturers took it up, uranium-colored glass had already been a documented European product for roughly half a century.

The 1885 patent for an American uranium glass

Frederick Stacey Shirley, working at the Mount Washington Glass Company in New Bedford, Massachusetts, filed US Patent 332,294 on September 30, 1885; it was granted that December 15. The patent, titled "Manufacture of Glass and Articles Therefrom," specifies roughly two pounds of uranium oxide and about one and a half pennyweights of prepared gold per batch, mixed into a standard lead-flint glass base. The result came out of the furnace "a beautiful sulphur-yellow color throughout," and reheating specific areas during finishing work developed "a delicate pink shade" that shaded back into the original yellow — a heat-reactive effect Mount Washington marketed as Burmese glass.

Burmese is not the transparent, green-fluorescing glass collectors call Vaseline — it is opaque, shading from soft yellow to blush pink, and its color comes from the combination of uranium oxide and gold rather than uranium alone. It is, however, the earliest well-documented American patent naming uranium oxide as a glass ingredient, predating any patent this guide's research could locate for a transparent Vaseline-type formula. A targeted search of trademark records under "Burmese" from the 1880s turned up no federal registration; geographic and descriptive terms are harder to register as trademarks under long-standing US trademark doctrine, which may be why Mount Washington relied on the patent rather than a trademark to control the name.

Thomas Webb & Sons of England licensed the formula from Mount Washington in 1886 and sold its own version as "Queen's Burmese Ware," reportedly a favorite of Queen Victoria. Webb's pieces were commonly marked with an impressed or acid-etched stamp reading "Thos Webb & Sons, Queen's Burmese Ware, Patented," sometimes alongside a British design registration number. Mount Washington's own pieces typically carried no permanent mark at all, relying on paper labels that have mostly been lost — one of the reasons Webb-marked Burmese is easier to attribute today than the American original.

How to tell real uranium glass under a light

Collectors' own working rule is blunt: if it does not glow green under ultraviolet light, it is not Vaseline glass, whatever its daylight color suggests. Genuine pieces fluoresce a distinctive bright green under a UV or blacklight source, a reaction caused by the uranium itself and not reproducible with ordinary colored glass. In normal light, true Vaseline glass runs from a bright yellow to a yellow-green, with a faintly oily look to the surface rather than a flat, uniform color.

"Uranium glass" is the broader category — any glass containing uranium dioxide, typically in the range of 1 to 2%, whether or not it is transparent and whether or not it fluoresces strongly. "Vaseline glass" is one narrower slice of it: transparent and green-fluorescent, specifically. A piece can contain real uranium and still fail the collectors' own definition of Vaseline glass if it is opaque, which is where custard glass and Burmese glass both fall.

For Burmese glass specifically, reproduction has its own tells. Fenton's post-1970 Burmese is typically marked and frequently still carries its original paper label. Gundersen's 1950s Burmese shows a more abrupt transition between its yellow and pink zones than the gradual shading on a Victorian original. Pairpoint's 1970s Burmese has a glossy finish rather than the satin, acid-matted surface standard on 19th-century pieces, and a wave of 1970s Italian copies tends to show cruder, rougher construction overall. An authentic Mount Washington piece from the 1880s typically shows a smooth, concave, polished pontil mark on the base and a matte satin finish; Thomas Webb's licensed English pieces are the ones most likely to carry a legible maker's stamp.

The look-alikes: custard, canary, and depression glass

Custard glass is opaque and pale yellow, often with a faint reddish opalescence visible when held up to light — the opposite of Vaseline glass's transparency, even though custard glass frequently contains uranium and will fluoresce under the same UV test. Sellers who use "Vaseline glass" as a catch-all for anything uranium-bearing will sometimes list custard glass under that name; by the stricter collectors' definition, it is uranium glass but not Vaseline glass specifically.

Depression glass, made by many of the same American factories during the 1920s and 1930s, came in a far wider color range than uranium glass ever did — red, pink, purple, blue, white, and black, alongside the yellow-green shades that do overlap with Vaseline glass. A piece of Depression-era glass only qualifies as Vaseline glass if its own color and fluorescence match; the shared manufacturing era and similar press-molded patterns are what cause the two categories to get confused in casual conversation, not any real overlap in what the glass is made of.

"Canary glass," the earlier 1840s-era name for the same bright yellow uranium coloring, survives today mostly as a period term collectors use when describing antique pieces specifically, rather than as an active category distinct from Vaseline glass — the color is the same; only the vocabulary changed with the decades.

Hunting a piece that glows under a blacklight, or a custard or Burmese find to check against this guide?

Search Vaseline glass Search uranium glass Search custard glass

Is it safe, and is it legal to own

Oak Ridge Associated Universities' Health Physics Museum has published measured figures rather than estimates. For glass running about 10% uranium content, gamma exposure at one foot runs roughly 0.0009 to 0.0018 millirem per hour, against a natural background of about 0.01 millirem per hour at the same distance — lower than ambient background radiation, not higher. A ten-inch plate of the same glass reads about 27 millirad per hour in beta particles at contact, falling to roughly 1.1 millirad per hour at one foot. Soaking a piece in water for 24 hours leached an average of 0.052 micrograms of uranium per liter, rising to an average of 5.9 micrograms per liter in acetic acid — enough that the museum's own guidance says not to use uranium glass as everyday dinnerware or drinkware, even though handling and display pose no meaningful risk. The highest documented doses in the museum's own data belonged to workers who transported large quantities of the glass in bulk, not to people who own a piece or two.

Ownership and sale are both unambiguously legal. Federal regulation 10 CFR 40.13(c)(2)(iii) exempts glassware containing source material — uranium or thorium — from licensing entirely, up to 10% by weight for anything manufactured before August 27, 2013, and up to 2% by weight for anything made after that date. Ordinary uranium glass runs roughly 1 to 2% uranium dioxide by weight, well under either threshold, and virtually all of it in circulation today — Victorian originals, Depression-era pieces, and the depleted-uranium glass made from 1959 onward — predates the 2013 cutoff and falls under the more permissive legacy limit. This is a named federal exemption, not an oversight or a gap nobody has gotten around to closing.

Production did pause for roughly fifteen years around the Second World War, when the US government requisitioned uranium supplies for weapons development rather than consumer goods, picking back up in 1959 with depleted uranium — the isotope mix left over after enrichment, with most of the fissile U-235 removed — in place of the natural uranium ore used before the war. Between 1958 and 1978, American manufacturers produced at least 4.16 million decorative uranium glass pieces by one documented count, including a run of 15,000 uranium glass drinking tumblers between 1968 and 1972 — the kind of plain production-run figure that rarely survives for a 19th-century decorative good but is well documented for the postwar depleted-uranium era.

What uranium glass sells for now

No single named-auction-house realized price for a representative piece turned up in this guide's research, so the figures above are asking-price ranges from the general antiques and specialist-dealer market rather than confirmed hammer prices, stated plainly rather than implied. Rarity within the category runs on form and maker far more than on uranium content alone — a plain pressed tumbler and a documented, maker-marked Victorian art-glass vase both qualify as genuine Vaseline glass, but sell in entirely different brackets. Marked Burmese commands the largest premium of anything in this guide because so little of the original Mount Washington production carries a permanent mark at all; an attributable piece is scarce in a way that ordinary pressed Vaseline glass, produced in the millions across a century of American manufacturing, is not.

For another Field Guide on a vintage object that is federally regulated rather than merely old, see Owl and Twig's guide to Fiesta's own radioactive red glaze. For more on an institutional source correcting a popular collecting myth, see the guide to Pyrex and the all-caps rule the Corning Museum itself debunks. See more Field Guides