The Belcher Mosaic Glass Company patented a new method of producing stained glass windows in 1884. The process involved laying out a design made up of thousands of small pieces of glass on a table and then covering it with a sheet of asbestos that had been coated in adhesive, and then once turned over, with another piece of asbestos. Molten metal was then poured into this “sandwich” to hold the glass pieces in place. Windows made in this manner were extremely popular for a decade or so. Many were produced for private homes in the East and the Midwest, but when demand declined, the Belcher company went out of business about 1897. This window was a transom in a large house built in Norwich, New York, around 1885, so it is one of the earlier Belcher windows known. Domestic stained glass was much admired at that time, and Louis Comfort Tiffany was the best-known American maker of such windows. Belcher’s mosaic windows were both less expensive and easier to produce than Tiffany’s, which accounted, at least in part, for their popularity.