According to Townsend (1786), "The glass manufacture is here carried to a degree of perfection unknown in England. The largest mirrors are made in a brass frame, one hundred and sixty-two inches long, ninety-three wide, and six deep, weighing near nine tons. These are designed wholly for the royal palaces, and for presents from the king. Yet even for such purposes the factory is ill-placed, and proves a devouring monster in a country where provisions are dear, fuel scarce, and carriage exceedingly expensive." Laborde wrote of the same factory a few years later: "There is also a glass-house, in which bottles are wrought of a superior quality; and white glasses, which are carved with much ingenuity (Plates lxxvi. and lxxvii.). Near this glass-house has been founded a manufactory for mirrors, in a large and well-arranged edifice. There are two furnaces, and a considerable number of stoves, in which the plates are left to cool after they have been precipitated. They are of all dimensions, and the largest that have yet been fabricated. They are sometimes from a hundred, a hundred and thirty, or a hundred and thirty-five inches in height, to fifty, sixty, or sixty-five inches in breadth: they are expanded in the hand. The process for polishing them is performed by a machine;[118] they are then transported to Madrid, for the purpose of being metallised. It is not uncommon to see tables of bronze, on which mirrors are extended, a hundred and sixty inches in length, and ninety in breadth." [118] This machine was invented by a Catalan named Pedro Fronvila. These tables are described by Bowles: "The largest measures a hundred and forty-five inches in length by eighty-five in breadth, and weighs four hundred and five _arrobas_. The smallest measures a hundred and twenty inches in length, and seventy-five in breadth, and weighs three hundred and eighty _arrobas_." [Illustration: LXXVI GLASS OF THE FACTORY OF SAN ILDEFONSO]