Chapter 2: A City Built of Glass
Michael Owens, who had grown up doing difficult and dangerous work in glass factories in Appalachia, was a genius at glass production innovation. When he returned from operating Libbey’s pavilion at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1892, Owens began to experiment in automated glass production. His efforts produced a five-armed, semi-automatic machine that picked up, molded, and blew light bulb glass, producing around 2000 bulbs an hour. The machine sped up production and reduced the need for skilled and highly-paid glass blowers. Libbey and Owens founded the Toledo Glass Company to develop Owens’s invention. With modifications, Owens turned the light bulb machine into a fully automatic machine to make glass bottles.
In 1903, Toledo Glass spun off the Owens Bottle Machine Company. Renamed the Owens Bottle Company in 1919, the factory quickly and cheaply produced bottles at standardized specifications with its “AR” model of the automatic bottle machine. The machine made possible the high-speed bottling production required by beverage and alcohol producers, and allowed for bottle designs that served as corporate trademarks. Owens’s company would merge with the Illinois Glass Company in 1929 to produce Owens-Illinois, Inc.
Owens’s innovation in the industry continued. He and Libbey teamed with Irving Colburn, a Pennsylvania glass technician who had a new idea for producing flat glass. Previous production techniques created distorted glass or required extensive polishing; Colburn’s machine picked up molten glass from a vat much like syrup, and rolled it between two cylinders, producing a continuous sheet of transparent glass of even width and thickness—a sheet of glass with fewer impurities. However, disputes over Colburn’s patents, along with production problems, led to Libbey and Owens buying Colburn’s patents at a bankruptcy auction for $15,000. The Libbey-Owens Sheet Glass Company used the Colburn technique to produce its products.
The Edward Ford Plate Glass Company was founded in 1898 just outside of Toledo in Rossford, a town named after the company’s founder and his wife. The factory became the largest plate glass company in the country, and was important to the new automobile industry. In 1929, following the deaths of Libbey, Owens, and Ford, the names of the three men of Toledo’s glass industry were joined together in a company formed by the merger of the Libbey-Owens Sheet Glass Company and Ford Plate Glass. Its factory was located in Rossford.
One more major company was yet to emerge from Toledo’s glass industry. In 1932, Dale Kleist, an engineer working for Owens-Illinois, discovered by accident a way to create long, fine glass fibers. Working with Games Slayter and Jack Thomas, the three men developed equipment to commercialize glass fiber production. Owens-Illinois teamed with Corning Glass Works in developing this technology and in 1938, a new company known as Owens-Corning Fiberglas was founded. Harold Boeschenstein, an executive with O-I, was named president. The company showed off its new product with much fanfare at the Glass Center exhibition at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.