 
Automating Glass Bottle Manufacture
Michael J. Owens in 1903 invented the first
commercially successful, fully automatic bottle-making machine in 1903 in
Toledo, then a world glass manufacturing center. The machine could produce
13,000 bottles a day and made glass containers cheap enough for foods,
beverages, and other household products. It also ended child labor in the glass
industry, since teams of young boys had been employed to make glass bottles by
hand, and helped to establish Toledo as "the Glass Capital of the World."
 Owens came from a hard working family. His father was a coal miner, and he
himself began working at the early age of ten in a glass factory in Wheeling,
WV. He knew all too well the hardships of a small child working in the heat and
rough environment of glass furnaces. Over the next twenty years, he moved up
through the factory and ultimately became a skilled glassblower.
In 1888 he moved to Toledo, OH and began a glassblowing career at Libbey. There
he developed a bottle machine that automated the bottle making process and
virtually eliminated child labor in the glass industry. The project was financed
by Edward D. Libbey (1854-1925) and executed with the aid of engineers William
Boch, C. William Schwenzfeier, and Richard LaFrance. Through automating the
glass blowing process, glass bottles and jars became less expensive to produce
and were used for more and more applications.
Owens Community College in Toledo, Ohio is also named after Michael Owens. He is
also the "Owens" in Owens-Illinois, Owens Corning and Libbey-Owens-Ford.
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