The automatic melting apparatus has been developed as a combinatorial methodology in the field of glass science and technology. The apparatus can manage 10 pieces of crucibles, where the 10 crucibles are automatically taken out from the furnace, followed by the automatic casting onto the metal plate. This procedure is perfectly reproducing the researcher's manual operation. Therefore we could certainly do 10 times as much as the work that we used to do in manual operation. Besides we could make a good performance on this apparatus for efficiency, accuracy, and reproducibility. In this paper, the concrete structure and mechanism of the apparatus is described. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.