Making Glass Bottles

In the 1800s, soda pop was sold at soda fountains. At the turn of the century, selling soda pop in bottles was becoming popular.

I wonder if these workers are making bottles or something more custom such as vases.

John Abbott posted

Toledoans Lured into the New Industry

"Workers get down to business in 1938 at the Libbey Glass factory in Toledo."

John Abbott posted
Automatic Glass Bottle Machine
Raulie Morse This looks like one of the old rotary machines, never saw one but I've heard of them.
[Judging from the handrail on the left, that machine must have been rather big.]

John Abbott posted
A Close hand Look at the Glass Making Machine .. as it runs today ... still making glass wear.
[In this case, stemware instead of bottles. Aluminum and plastic decimated the glass bottle market. I can remember as a kid drinking pop out of just bottles and the milkman delivering milk in bottles.]

Libbey Glass

John Abbot posted
My hometown Toledo Ohio made lots and lots of parts for glass machines...
1888?

Once again, notice how the illustrator shows black smoke coming out of each smokestack because in the 19th century that was considered a symbol of prosperity, not pollution.

PeachRidgeGlass
Libbey Glass Works – Toledo, Ohio

Libbey has a history page, but this overview is better.

The Libbey Glass Company was one of the largest glass manufacturers in the United States of America during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
In 1888, Edward Libbey moved his glass-manufacturing establishment from Massachusetts to Toledo, Ohio. His workers utilized a recently discovered deposit of natural gas to manufacture the glass. The Libbey Glass Company produced bottles, containers, window glass. The firm was best known for its cut glass.
The Libbey Glass Company became even more profitable after Michael Owens, an inventor from Newark, Ohio, joined the firm. Owens developed a machine that could automatically produce bottles, tumblers, and glass chimneys. This invention dramatically increased production. It also lowered manufacturing costs, as the company was able to fire workers now that machines could do the work instead.
The Libbey Glass Company continued to grow during the early twentieth century. With the creation of the automobile and this invention's wide-scale acceptance, the Libbey Glass Company began to produce windshields. Thanks to the efforts of the Libbey Glass Company, Toledo became known as “the glass capital of the world” during the early 1900s. The company remains in operation in the twenty-first century. In 2004, it was the United States' largest manufacturer of glass dinnerware, with plants in Louisiana, California, and Ohio, as well as in the Netherlands. [OhioHistoryCentral]

Company-histories has the history of Libbey while they were in Massachusetts. This reference also explains: "A turning point came in 1892 when the Corning Glass Works was shut down by a strike and Libbey Glass was able to secure a contract from Edison General Electric to produce handblown light bulbs." Also of note is that movie merchandising is not a recent development: "Of note during this period [the depression] was a promotional tie-in with Walt Disney's highly successful animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Countless tumblers featuring characters from the movie were filled by dairies with cottage cheese and sold across the country."

It is refreshing to read about a company that still has manufacturing facilities in America. Google found these in the Toledo area: Toledo Ash St., Perrysburg (just warehousing and distribution) and the headquarters. I could not find any location information on their web site.

"A poorly timed introduction of high-end art glass during the Great Depression proved to be a costly mistake for the company, and it was sold to Owens-Illinois Glass Company in 1935. In the wake of World War II, the Libbey brand discontinued handmade cut glass to focus on machine-made and heat-treated glassware. In 1993 the division was spun off into an independent venture again, as Libbey Inc. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the company acquired several international glassmakers and expanded its operations to include flatware production and a number of overseas factories." [Britannica]

Update:  Libbey Inc. celebrates 200 years.


This is a photo for the interior of the Toledo train station that was opened in 1950. Note the "GLASS CENTER OF THE WORLD" graphic. Libby is just one of four companies in the city.

citylab
Glass Center of the World! (New York Central Historical Society)

Pilkington Glass' Ottawa, IL, Location

Bird's Eye View

While studying a satellite image of the sand mines west of Ottawa, I noticed some industrial buildings down by the river. Google showed that they belong to Pilkington North America. The float process of manufacturing flat glass was invented in the 1950s at the headquarters of Pilkington in St. Helens, United Kingdom.

This Ottawa location is advantageous for making glass because of its close proximity to the major ingredients of glass --- pure silica sand (60% of a batch), limestone and dolomite. And to coal to provide the 1500-degree C heat needed to melt those ingredients. (Natural gas is used now.) For an overview of the float process of manufacturing flat glass, the interval from about 1:00 to 5:00 of a video is interesting. I also watched Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of a series of four videos for better views of the plant equipment. A video of the Watson Street plant shows a process before float glass was invented. (I watched just a little of this video. It was very redundant.)

According to a lady giving me a tour the the 20th century part of the La Salle County Museum, this plant was originally owned by Libbey-Owens-Ford and had over a 1000 employees making glass for the automotive industry. When Pilkington bought the plant and the LOF brand in 1986, they converted it to make "architectural glass," that is, glass for buildings. Because of automation, the lady said Pilkington reduced the number of employees to 55 people. When Nippon Sheet Glass (NSG) bought Pilkington in June 2006, the LOF name was abandoned to rebrand globally under the Pilkington name. (Wikipedia and museum attendent)

Update: Michael Matalis posted about tornadoes hitting Ottawa and Naplate. I now noticed the Bear Den that I ate in on a railfanning trip is on the edge of that town in spite of its US Mail address. But the reason for the update is to record some comments made about the glass factory.
Harold J. Krewer Pilkington still gets inbound material, mostly sand. No finished glass has moved by rail for decades. The plant makes thermal pane glass for window makers like Pella and Andersen.

Harold J. Krewer Back when it was Libby-Owens-Ford, there were TWO plants in Naplate, Plants 5 and 7, side-by-side. They made almost all the automobile windshields for GM there. Employed almost 2,000. Today maybe 350 work at the current facility.

Karold J. Krewer commented on the above posting
This is a Rock Island map of the trackage in Naplate and the glass plant back in the 70s. RI and BN jointly served this line:

The Coke Bottle Shape

I was researching who owned the company that made bottles in Terre Haute, IN because I knew that company was the one that invented the trademark shape of the Coke bottle. The answer is Chapman S. Root. But the story of the bottle's shape is interesting in its own right. Coke started as a soda fountain drink in 1886. (When I came to Downers Grove, there was a soda fountain in the back of a drug store on Curtiss Street. It is now gone. I don't know where any soda fountains are now.) In 1889, two Chattanooga lawyers traveled to Atlanta to get the rights to bottle the product. By 1920, over 1,200 bottling franchises were established. Sales were so successful that competitors imitated the trademark "to deceive the public into buying their drinks." By 1915 they decided to develop a distinctive bottle. (CokeCo)

So, eight to 10 glass companies across the U.S. subsequently received a challenge to develop a “bottle so distinct that you would recognize if by feel in the dark or lying broken on the ground.” With that simple creative brief, the competition was on. (CokeCo)

In 1913, a machinist named Earl Dean came up with the Coca-Cola bottle’s original design, alternately called the “hobble skirt” or the “Mae West.” Ironically, neither the kola nut nor the coca leaf, two of the key ingredients in the beverage’s original recipe, is represented in the bottle’s design. Legend has it that Earl Dean mistakenly turned to the wrong page in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and based his sketches on the cacao tree seed pod. Its vertical ribbing and voluptuous curves are replicated in the contour bottle. (IndianaMedia)

Once a sketch was made at the library by Earl Dean, he worked through the night adapting the sketch to a hand machined mold depicting the curved cocoa pod as the center portion of the newly designed sample Coca-Cola bottle. With limited time remaining before the molten glass furnaces would be shut down for cleaning, Dean produced a few sample bottles that would be submitted to the national Coca-Cola bottle contest. (Wikipedia)

The bottles are not old, but the carrier is old.

EarlyCoke

The Root Glass Company won the competition. This is a prototype. Before the design went into production, it was slimmed down so that the middle and base were of the same diameter and the bottle would work with bottling machinery.

Other companies also manufactured the bottle, but Root got a royalty --- 5 cents for every 144 bottles (Top40).  He became one of the richest men in Indiana.

The green color is because of the copper and minerals that happened to be in the Fern Cliffs sandstone that Root used as their source of sand. Other companies would have to add additional minerals to their sand to reproduce what became known as the Georgia Green color. (EarlyCoke) (Georgia was the home state of Coke.)

Glass Making

I came across notes on glass making in the Buffalo region while researching the Niagara Power Stations. Not only were the notes interesting, it occurred to me that glass making is an important part of our industrial heritage. Below is a summary of the notes.

Glass containers were first produced in Egypt about 2,000 B.C. The blowpipe was invented around 300 B.C.

In the Lockport and Lancaster factories, the ingredients for glass were melted in a furnace in large pots at 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit for thirty to forty hours and then cooled to about 1,800 degrees to a more workable consistency. The furnaces were originally wood fired. Until 1820, glass was made with a blowpipe. However molds might be used to give the glass its shape. In 1820 the "pressed glass" method was invented. "A glob of glass was gathered on an iron rod by a workman, dropped into a pieced mold on a machine, and a plunger forced the glass into all parts of the mold." In 1903 the glass blowing machine was invented. "Although furnaces are now heated by natural gas rather than wood or coal, the same technique of blowing is used in the modern automatic machines which turn out thousands of bottles or jars an hour.

The first glass factory in Lockport, NY, was opened in 1840. It went through a series of owners, but it grew before it went out of business in 1908. Another glass factory was started in 1900. In 1919 this plant was bought by the Thatcher Manufacturing Company and concentrated on milk bottles. "The introduction of paper milk containers forced them to switch to jelly, pickle and coffee jars, and they closed the factory in 1942."

The glass works in Lancaster was started in 1849 by eight blowers from Pittsburgh. It also went through a series of owners, but it operated until 1904. In 1907 a new factory was started to produce food and beverage containers. The notes state that in 1965 it consolidated with another plant in Pennsylvania. I gather that the Lancaster plant was shutdown as part of this consolidation.

There are quite a few pages describing the products produced by these factories in detail for the benefit of collectors such as

A very rare Lockport half-pint flask in pale yellow-green and aquamarine has a duck swimming with the words above, "Will you take a drink?" and the answer, "Will a [duck] swim"? with a plain reverse side.

The notes end with a discussion of why the factories closed. "Continental Can Co. with a branch in Lancaster was forced to dissolve its glass container operations in 1963 by federal anti-trust laws. To achieve economy in operations smaller plants often consolidated or moved nearer to the customer who purchased the containers."