Louis Comfort Tiffany 

     After Tiffany had formed a partnership with Colman, Lockwood DeForest, and Candace Wheeler, and after having incorporated the interior decorating firm of L.C. Tiffany & Associated Artists, a desire to concentrate on art in glass led Tiffany to choose to establish his own glassmaking firm. The first Tiffany Glass Company was incorporated on December 1, 1885. It became the Tiffany Glass & Decorating Company in 1892, and the Tiffany Studios in 1900. He had used commercial glass houses for 19 years to supply his Manhattan showroom and clients, but wanted to be fully in charge of production and design security. Finally, in 1892 he founded his own glassworks, the Louis C. Tiffany Furnaces in Corona Queens. As a youth Tiffany had attended the Flushing Institute, on Roosevelt Avenue between Main and Union Streets, where the North Shore bus terminal now sits. Tiffany was keenly aware of the area's potential and for his furnaces to succeed, he needed to hire the town's pool of experienced immigrant workers, who were then mostly Italian, German, and Irish." Tiffany experimented with glass. Sand for glassmaking was abundantly available at nearby Oyster Bay. Tiffany would eventually oversee two hundred artisans. Among them, Clara Driscoll, whose dragonfly lamp won a prize in the 1900 Paris Exposition, was by 1904 one of the highest paid women in the world. Even some of Tiffany's artists were foreigners, such as Venetian-born Andrea Boldini, and both Englishmen Joseph Briggs and Arthur J. Nash.