Making Glass Bottles
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Making Glass Bottles For thousands of years since its development in Syria, manufacturing glass objects was considered an art. Difficulty in controlling viscosity, heat transfer, and nonlinear relaxation properties of glass made that industry one of the last to be mechanized by the industrial revolution. After the b l o w p i p e was i n v e n t e d in about 100 B.C., the process of making hollow glass containers changed little until the 1880s. Indeed, the most significant earlier developments were the foot-operated bellows (1679) and crossfire burners (1790). But beginning in 1882, four decades of rapid and remarkably creative innovation brought the glass industry into modern times. Mechanical h o r s e p o w e r applied within the glass industry during 1880-1920 increased 36-fold, compared with an average 8-fold increase in other industries. Where the scarcity and cost of skilled labor had restricted the uses of hand-blown glass containers, mechanization made possible low-cost glass bottles. Labor unions eventually applauded the mechanization they had resisted w h e n it became clear the booming demand for glass would support many more jobs with better working conditions than before. Edward Meigh profiled a dozen pioneers in mechanizing glass bottle making in the premiere issue of Glass Technology (1960). Philip Arbogast of Pittsburgh and Howard Ashley of England independently (in 1881 and 1886, respectively) determined that three steps are essential to making bottles with machines: (1) form the neck and mouth of the bottle first, (2) create an intermediate "parison" before (3) finally blowing the glass into a separate final shaping mold. In 1898, but apparently independently as well, a brash uneducated American, Michael J. Owens, began his remarkable bottle making experiments. The son of an Irish immigrant coal miner in West Virginia, O w e n s was forced to work at age 10 to support his widowed mother. He learned the glass trade — and the deplorable conditions prevalent for child workers in those days — in a Wheeling flint glass plant. He became active in the glass workers union. In 1888 Owens joined what was to become the Libbey Glass Company as a second-ranking glass blower in the Toledo plant. Within two years, Edward D. Libbey named him plant superintendent.
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While in charge of the company's exhibit at the 1893 Columbian Exhibit in Chicago, O w e n s c o n c e i v e d h i s first i d e a s for mechanical glass blowing. The Toledo Glass \Company was formed to develop Owens' machines. A diplomatic manager, Libbey s u p p o r t e d the " u n c u l t u r e d , ungrammatical, egotistic, arrogant, domineering" Owens through six experimental machines, often without the support of his co-directors. Beginning in 1903, twelve different production machines followed and became industry standards. The most capable — the CA and CB models introduced in 1920 — had 15 bottle making arms and could make up to 320 bottles a minute! This single machine could produce more and better quality bottles than 450 skilled han
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