73 Ap 001

Trans. Newcomen Soc.
, 73 (20012002), 131
The Mechanisation of Glass

Container Production
by
Michael CABLE, PhD, DScTech, TkDhc, HonFSGT
Read at the Royal Entomological Society, London 17 October 2001
INTRODUCTION
The invention of the blowpipe around AD 50 made it possible to expand a mass of hot
glass on the end of the pipe. This allowed the manufacture of hollow glass containers with
undamaged mirror-like internal surfaces which possessed many advantages, particularly
impermeability, lack of reaction with most of the materials that might be stored in them, and
transparency. It also became possible to make containers of standard dimensions and various shapes by blowing the glass in a mould. The main problem for the user was making
an air tight seal but that was alleviated by making bottles with narrow necks and mouths:
eventually the manufacture of closures of various kinds became a small but important
industry.
Glass gathered on a blowpipe naturally tends to form a large drop of circular cross
section which may be maintained by continually rotating the pipe; it may then be stretched
or slumped back on itself by holding the blowpipe either down or up as well as by blowing.
A small bubble must be blown quickly otherwise the glass around the nose of the blowpipe
becomes too viscous to flow when blown (the pressure that can be exerted by mouth being
quite small). Only a few tools and simple but skilled operations are then needed to form a
bottle that maintains its circular section and has a flat base to stand on. When cool enough
not to deform under its own weight, it may be attached to a punty (a short metal rod) or held
by a simple cage, cracked off the blow pipe, and the neck reheated to make a proper mouth
before being annealed. That is why the mouth of a glass container is always known as the
finish.
Using a mould to form the body can produce large numbers of containers of almost
identical external dimensions but to obtain a uniform internal capacity the same quantity of
glass must be gathered every time. Immediately blowing a gather into a cylindrical mould
gives a bottle with thin corners, thick neck, and thick base because the glass that is stretched
further inevitably becomes thinner; similar problems arise in blowing a bottle of rectangular
or oval cross section, see Fig. 1. A considerable amount of shaping may be needed before the
glass can be blown to give the desired uniform wall thickness. This preliminary shaping to
form the parison uses gravity to stretch or shorten the gather and also involves rolling it on
a flat surface (a marver). These skills were developed long ago and used with very little
change for many centuries.
The time needed to make a bottle varied with the size and type of article but could be as
much as two or three minutes. By the nineteenth century teams of glass-makers, each doing
Copyright The Newcomen Society 2006 all rights reserved
THE MECHANISATION OF GLASS CONTAINER PRODUCTION
Fig. 1. Undesirable distribution of wall

thickness obtained by blowing a simple gather
in moulds: (a) vertical section of typical bottle,
(b) transverse cross section of square bottle.
just one part of the cycle of operations, were commonly used to speed the manufacture,
especially where fuel for the furnace was expensive. The rules of the Yorkshire Glass Bottle
Makers Union in 1838 mention five grades of member: journeyman, gatherer, blower, bottle
maker, and apprentice (Hodkin1 ).
As the nineteenth century advanced, the growth of towns and cities and of trade vastly
increased the need for glass containers for beer, wines, chemicals, and many other products.
Soon after Queen Victorias accession glass manufacturers were actively seeking ways of
developing their industry, as is shown by patents for improvements in furnaces (see, for
example, Chance Brothers2, Bessemer3) and the use of iron moulds for which Magoun4
obtained two patents in 1847. Pressing of ware was the first section of the industry to show
progress, especially in the United States from around 1860, partly because only one highly
skilled worker, the gatherer, was necessary. The other main branches of the industry
required much greater numbers of skilled workmen. However, the limitations on shape
imposed by using a mould for both the internal and external form of the ware restrict the
kinds of containers made by pressing to those widest at the mouth, such as jugs and bowls
or, today, television screens.
Neither of the two main branches of the industry, containers and flat glass, had seen a
major advance for several hundred years, except for the invention of cast plate glass in
France around 1695, but the successful development of the Siemens regenerative tank in
1867 (Cable5) made possible the continuous supply of the much increased quantities of glass
that were needed for increased production and stimulated the search for effective methods
of large scale manufacture.
BASIC PHYSICS
Glasses are Newtonian liquids for which rate of flow is proportional to applied stress. Quite
small stresses or pressures can be used in glass making, so the apparatus used does not need
to be massive.
All the main methods of making glassware rely on the very rapid variation of viscosity
with temperature. At the high temperatures (13501650C) used to melt them, silicate
glasses are very viscous compared with most familiar liquids and the viscosity, which defines
the rate of flow under applied stresses, increases rapidly as temperature falls. Glass manufacturing operations depend on adjusting the viscosity (by selecting the right temperature)
so that only small stresses are needed but gravity does not entirely govern its flow, then
simultaneously shaping the glass and cooling it so that it is too viscous to flow under gravity
once it has attained the desired form. Each stage of manufacture has an appropriate viscosity and thus temperature: control of heat transfer is vital. If the shaping cannot be completed quickly, as is often the case in hand working, the partly formed object may have to be
reheated, consuming more time and thermal energy.
The most important properties of the glass thus are viscosity, density, thermal conductivity, and specific heat. However, it should be noted that glass forming operations begin at
temperatures at which thermal radiation has an important role in heat transfer and the
colour of the glass, or more precisely its transparency to infrared radiation, affects heat
transmission and thus glass forming operations (Cable6).
The variation of viscosity, usually denoted by Greek eta (g), with temperature is
greater than for any other property commonly dealt with and is so large that glass makers
usually speak of its logarithm, not its actual value and use the deciPascal second (dPa s)
as the unit. At maximum melting temperature the viscosity is about log g = 2 and for
stress release during annealing it has increased by a factor about 1012 to around log g = 14.
Viscosity also varies greatly with glass composition.
GLASS FORMING OPERATIONS
It is convenient to divide the whole cycle of operations into three stages, gathering the glass
from the furnace, forming (usually by blowing), and annealing. Glass makers understand
the term annealing to mean slow cooling of the glass to leave very little internal stress at
room temperature. Figure 2 shows these ranges marked on the viscositytemperature curve
for a typical sodalimesilica glass. Rates of flow can be varied by adjusting either temperature or the pressures used but rates of heat transfer are not so easy to accelerate and heat
transfer often controls the maximum rate of production. As has often happened, inventors
developed processes by experience, intuition, and experiment, with scientific understanding
and analysis lagging behind until recently.
Conditions at the glassmould interface are crucial. If the glass is too hot it flows so
easily under gravity that it cannot be controlled. If the mould is too hot, even if the glass is at
the right temperature, the two stick together. When conditions are just right, the glass flows
to the shape of the mould and the two may very briefly stick together: however, the glass is
cooled somewhat and contracts whilst the mould is heated and expands. The stresses
thereby produced are sufficient to break the weak adhesion and the two separate. If the glass
is too cool it cannot flow to the required shape under the stresses being used and it may
fracture. Too cool a mould chills the glass too much and it flows unevenly to look rather like
hammered pewter; the glass may also develop fine surface cracks that greatly impair its
strength. There is therefore a limited range of temperatures for both glass and mould within
which good results can be obtained. This behaviour means that the heat transfer coefficient
at the inner surface of the mould varies considerably with time of contact.
Fig. 2. Typical viscosity-temperature curve

for a silicate glass showing the ranges used
at different stages of glass forming.
Moulds are usually made in halves, split vertically, as they need to open and close, and
are mostly made from special grades of cast iron but other alloys are used for some components. Moulds have to be designed to keep the temperatures of all their parts in the correct
range and to give up as much heat whilst empty as they gain from the glass whilst the
container is being formed. A mould can make around five million containers.
Contact of the glass with the parison mould inevitably chills the surface of the glass as
the parison is being shaped and reheat of the glass is necessary. Very steep temperature
gradients occur near the surfaces of the glass whilst it is in contact with the mould. When
shaping of the parison is finished the mould halves are opened just a fraction to create a
small air gap between glass and mould. This suddenly causes a great decrease in the rate of
heat transfer from the glass; as a result the chilled surface layer regains temperature and its
viscosity decreases so that the parison is more easily blown in the second mould.
An appreciable proportion of the heat removed from the glass is lost from the inner
surface of the mould by cooling it with compressed air whilst empty but conduction through
the wall and loss from the outer surface is also important. The latter is controlled by forced
convection of air.
These phenomena were first studied in as much detail as the available rather crude
experimental methods allowed 60 years ago (Boow7). The state of knowledge in the 1960s
was reported in an American Ceramic Society symposium8 on heat transfer. Computer
modelling is now widely used but that still depends on assumptions about various important
parameters.
FALTERING FIRST STEPS
The earliest known patent for a vertically split iron mould with movable base plate and
means for blowing with compressed air to make bottles was granted to Mein9 of Glasgow in
1859. It was closely followed by those of Kilner10 and Bowron.11 The earliest US patent
appears to be that of Weber12 in 1876.
The most important change to the manual process was to make the mouth or finish
first, so that the glass could be held in a neck ring whilst the rest of the operations were
performed. Three American patents recognised this and showed how it might be done by
pressing then blowing. The first was granted to Gillender13 in 1865. A few years later the
Atterburys14 patented pressing the finish, with spout and handle, of a wide-mouth pitcher
before blowing the body. Arbogast15 in 1882 patented a process for pressing the parison of
narrow-mouth ware (Figure 3) then blowing the final article. That patent recognised the
necessity of using a neck ring and two separate moulds to form a parison and then the final
article. Arbogast sold the rights for his method to the D.C. Ripley company in 1885 and
some machines based on it were made but hostility of the glass blowers union prevented
their effective exploitation. Only after that company had been taken over by the United
States Glass Company which granted licences to other firms not under union control, did
one of those, the New Enterprise Glass Company, successfully produce any containers
(Vaseline jars) by this method in 1893.
Around 1865 Josiah Arnall, the postmaster at Ferrybridge in Yorkshire, having seen
bottles being made whilst carrying out his duties, conceived the idea of mechanising the
process but failed to persuade the glass manufacturer (Edgar Breffitt) whom he tried to
interest (English16). Almost 20 years later H.M. Ashley, manager of an iron foundry at
Ferrybridge, went to live at the same house as Arnall and the two of them must have discussed Arnalls idea because they jointly obtained a patent in 1886.17 This proposed to use an
inverted body mould with a plug at the bottom to make the mouth of the container and a
sliding base plate to press the glass down into the neck ring to form the mouth. This base
plate was then to be retracted to the top of the mould and compressed air used to blow the
bottle (Figure 4). Ashley18 obtained another patent for a somewhat more elaborate version
only six months later. That envisaged forming the bottle by applying suction to the outside
rather than compressed air internally or using materials that would volatilise on heating. It
seems that Ashley had left his post in the iron works to devote himself entirely to glass
machines because he described himself as a machinist, not a factory manager in that patent.
Within a year Ashley19 obtained another patent with two crucial improvements, the
provision of a separate neck ring mould to hold the glass during the other manipulations
and the use of a separate parison mould; the latter gave a much better distribution of wall
thickness. The patent also envisaged making a four arm rotating machine.
A simple machine with one pair of moulds mounted on a sturdy wooden upright (hence
the plank machine) was tried at Armley in Leeds, Castleford, or Knottingley in 1886 (four
accounts, Hodkin1, English,16 Turner20, and Meigh,21 differ about the place where the first
machine was made and the location of the first trial). A machine of this type for regular
production was installed at the works of Sykes & McVay in Castleford the next year.
Although it was rather primitive, the results encouraged Ashley to continue and the Ashley
Bottle Company was formed in 1887. A newspaper report of that year22 described this
advance in bottle making at length and claimed that the labour cost of making a gross of
bottles was reduced from 3s 10p (0.192) to only 3d (0.013) when using the machine.
Ashleys23 next patent was for a method of inserting the glass marble that provided the seal
in Codd mineral water bottles.
A better engineered version of the machine which worked in the same way, constructed
in iron, was patented in 188924 (Fig. 5). The machine needed to be fed by hand with gobs of
Fig. 3. The press and blow

process illustrated in Arbogasts
patent.
Fig. 4. Ashleys original plank

machine.
Fig. 5. Ashleys later version of the original machine. Parison

mould A and neck ring B both held by tongs, Blow mould C is
raised by treadle D after parison is turned upright.
glass, an obvious limitation. Achieving an almost constant weight of glass and thus internal
capacity required a skilled gatherer to perform a rather boring task. One gatherer could
supply two of these machines and make 1560 soda-water bottles in a 10.5 hour shift. That
was a considerable advance over the traditional hand process.
At the same time Ashley applied for another patent25 for a machine with four moulds on
a rotating table so that four parisons were simultaneously at different stages of manufacture
but there was still only one body mould, mounted externally, and Ashley again mentioned
the possibility of forming by applying vacuum rather than compressed air. That machine
required a source of power such as a belt drive powered by a steam engine, a supply of
compressed air, and one workman besides the gatherer. The first of those machines were
built in Sheffield but proved ineffective, probably because the timing of the mechanical
operations did not match the rate at which the glass cooled. The use of compressed air to
operate a piston to open and close the parison mould and allowing the blower to control the
rotation of a machine with only three parison moulds was an improvement. That version
allowed two men to make 2160 bottles per working day. At one stage Ashley had ten of
those semi-automatic machines in operation at Castleford. Unfortunately the Ashley Company did not prosper, for various reasons including hostility of the local unions, and it was
wound up in 1894, some time after its troubles began.
Horne,26 who had worked with Ashley, obtained another patent in his own name and
began to manufacture similar machines. Dralle27 saw 22 machines, possibly made by Horne
and supplied by a Siemens tank, in operation at Castleford in 1892. By 1917 Horne had sold
200 of his machines in Britain. He also sold machines to France, Germany, and the USA
(Turner20). These early English machines were known by the name Johnny Bull in the USA.
Boucher, a glass manufacturer in Cognac, obtained patents in 1894 and 1895; his
machines became widely used in France from 1897; Forsters in St Helens bought the rights
to the Boucher machine in 1899 or 1900 and sold some of their machines in both England
and Scotland (Turner20 ). In Germany Schiller introduced a press and blow machine in 1905
and both blow-blow and suction machines (these terms are explained below) the next year;
Schiller machines were used extensively in Europe for several decades. By 1932 around 700
Schiller machines had been sold in Europe including Russia. Such semi-automatic machines
remained in use until around 1960 for the production of small containers such as ink bottles
and those for some cosmetic and pharmaceutical products. However, the lack of a good
mechanical gob feeder to supply them held back the development of those machines for
about 25 years.
COMPRESSED AIR IN THE GLASSHOUSE
At the end of the nineteenth century it was still not widespread practice to have air compressors or vacuum pumps in glass houses (forced draught was not used for furnaces)
and Ashley had suggested the use of materials that vaporised when heated, instead of
compressed air, for blowing.
The first known supplement to blowing by lung power alone was to run a little water
down the blowpipe, from the mouth, then quickly cover the mouthpiece with the thumb to
trap the steam formed as the water evaporated. This trick was often used when blowing
large vessels. The earliest recorded mechanical device was a small manually operated pump
that could be applied to the mouth piece of a blow pipe; this pompe Robinet was invented by
a blower of that name with limited lung-power working at Baccarat in 1824 (Appert28 ).
Kirn29 noted in 1830 that blowers at St. Louis in the Vosges used cylindrical bellows for large
articles and to attain a greater pressure so that designs cut in the surface of the mould were
sharply impressed on the surface of the glass thereby avoiding having subsequently to cut
the designs on medium quality wares. His account does not make it clear whether that was
the Robinet invention.
Compressed air was first used extensively in a glass works at Clichy where it was
installed by Appert28 in 1879. As a considerable range of wares was made there, the air was
available at three pressures of about 0.2, 1, and 3 kg/cm2. Once the idea of compressed
air was accepted, it began to be used to drive machines, for mould cooling, and to assist
ventilation around the furnace. Air compressors soon became a necessary adjunct to the
commercial glasshouse.
THE FIRST AUTOMATIC MACHINE
M.J. Owens (18591923) was the son of Irish immigrants to the United States. He began
work in a glass factory in Wheeling, West Virginia, at the age of ten, when his father died,
and had become a skilled blower by the age of 15. Over the next decade he acquired some
education and began to display considerable ability.
Edward D. Libbey moved his glass works from Massachusetts to Toledo, Ohio in 1888
for several reasons including strikes by the workers, also the availability of cheaper sand and
natural gas in Toledo (Scoville30). In that year Owens joined a team of blowers making chimneys for oil lamps in Libbeys factory. Libbey soon recognised the exceptional abilities of his
employee and within two years Owens was promoted to be superintendent of the factory in
which position he devoted his mind to ways of increasing production.
He began to think about machines, first for making lamp chimneys and then containers. In 1892 he obtained his first patent for a mechanical device to replace the person, often
a boy, who crouched at the blowers feet just to open and close the mould in which the glass
was blown (Owens31). Owens also conceived a machine that would assist a blower by removing moils, the glass left adhering to the nose of the blowpipe when the article had been
removed to finish its mouth.
Owens approached the problem of mechanisation in a new way, beginning by considering what his own experience told him was the crucial question, namely how to gather the
correct quantity of glass every time, a question that others including Ashley had not
addressed. He decided that filling a gathering mould by suction was the best approach and
used a mould attached to a device rather like a large bicycle pump to test this idea: the
earliest patent to describe such an implement for vacuum gathering was by Croskey and
Locke.32 The promising results led Owens to base his machine on filling a gathering mould
which also served as the parison mould, by suction. Owens later said that the basic idea
for a bottle machine occurred to him in 1898 but it took five years of development work,
generously supported by E.D. Libbey, to produce a machine that worked.
Patents granted to Owens in 189596 show that he was already attempting to mechanise glass forming but his ideas were then rather primitive and confined to aids for the glass
blower. However, the earliest patents granted to Owens33 for his bottle machine already
included all its essential features. One of his main ideas was to make the machine rotate
continuously around a central pillar bearing cams that controlled most of the operations.
Although that was very neat and precise, it allowed only limited possibility of adjustment to
the timing of the various stages and the range of movement of the components.
The main sequence of operations on the Owens machine is shown in Figure 6. The
parison mould dips into a pool of glass and is filled by suction; on lifting it out of the pool a
Fig. 6. The sequence of operations of an Owens machine. (1) Filling parison mould
by suction; (2) mould raised and knife severing tail; (3) parison mould opened and
blow mould about to enclose parison; (4) parison in blow mould; (5) bottle blown;
(6) blow mould and neck ring opened for bottle to be removed.
knife flicks across to sever the thread of glass still connecting the two. The parison begins to
elongate under the influence of both gravity and a puff of air blown in to prevent freezing
of the mouth. Then the parison mould opens and the halves of the blow mould and a base
plate rise from below to enclose the parison so that the bottle can be blown. After cooling
sufficiently in the mould, the neck ring is removed, the body mould opens and the base plate
tilts so that the bottle falls off and is carried to the annealing lehr. The whole sequence of
operations to make one container occupied about one revolution of the machine. A
six-arm machine, his fourth, was run successfully at the Toledo Glass Company in 1903;
that led to formation of the Owens Bottle Machine Company which started to produce
machines that year. As they needed no skilled gatherer they were quickly taken up by some
manufacturers.
Owens had to build onto the furnace a separate heated chamber containing a large
slowly rotating shallow bowl, called the rotating pot, so that successive moulds dipped into
fresh unchilled glass; this also prevented the problems that could arise if the mould were
being dragged through stationary glass during gathering.
Continuous rotation used much less power than intermittent rotation but, on the
earliest machines, the whole rotating part of the machine was lowered during gathering
10
Fig. 7. Section through the parison mould head of an Owens

machine. Parison mould A lowered to gather glass from rotating
bowl B.
then raised again and that required rather elaborate counterweights. Owens then developed
a version (type AN, introduced in 1912) on which each head was raised and lowered individually by cam action. Figure 7 shows part of such a machine in position to gather the
glass.
The original version (type A) had six arms carrying identical sets of moulds and could
make containers of from 120 to 1200 mL capacity at rates of 4 to 40 per minute; it was 2.5m
in diameter. Improved versions which extended the range of capacities and increased speed
of production appeared at intervals. Table 1 shows the range of machines eventually produced. The limited range of adjustment possible on a machine where most actions were camcontrolled was partly responsible for the range of variants produced. Owens machines
needed about 3 hp to rotate the pot and 6 hp for the machine itself but the provision of
vacuum, blowing air and cooling air for the moulds required about another 47 hp (Dralle
and Keppeler34). The large rotating pot also considerably increased the fuel consumption of
the furnace.
The first Owens machine to be brought to England was installed at Trafford Park,
Manchester in 1906. That machine was transferred to Alloa Glass Works in Scotland
in 1908 and remained in operation there until about 1931 (Turner20). Owens saw that
productivity could be improved by having two cavities in one mould body, where the
11
TABLE 1
The Owens range of machines
Type
No. of
arms
Year
introduced
Capacity
fl. oz.(US)
Production
per min.
A
AC
AE
AD
AL
AN
AR
AQ
CA
CB
AT
OS
6
6
6
10
8
10
10
15
10*
10*
6
6
190304
1908
1909
1909
1912
1912
1912
1914
192023
192023
1915
1954
440
440
464
464
16160
0.12511.5
480
480
max. 8
832
961952
735
1020
1122
1224
2426
812
2060
1245
1860
80320
80160
67
2242
* Two sets of moulds per arm
dimensions allowed, and later by mounting two sets of moulds on each arm of the machine
(types CA and CB). The former practice eventually led to up to four small containers being
made in one set of moulds. The AT machine introduced in 1915 was huge (4 m diameter),
weighing more than 100 tons, but it could make carboys of capacity up to 5 gallons at a rate
of 5 to 6 per minute (Meigh35).
The fifteen arm machines (AQ and AV) could make as many bottles as 50 skilled blowers but the traditional methods were not at once made obsolete. All the Owens machines
were large (the CA was more than 5 m in diameter) and expensive; a complete unit cost $80,
000 in the early days, although it could work out up to 70 tons of glass a day. They were best
suited to making very long runs of one design of container. Table 2 shows a comparison of
the costs of production by hand and by Owens machine made in the UK in 191920
(Meigh35); the machine decreased the overall cost by 37%.
TABLE 2
Costs () for making one gross of the same article (United Kingdom, 191920)
Raw Materials
Coal
Electricity
Wages: Furnace
Bottle making
Repairs
Royalties
Interest on capital
Other costs
TOTAL
Owens
Machine
Hand
0.134
0.149
0.013
0.020
0.026
0.037
0.013
0.009
0.323
0.724
0.107
0.198
0.004
0.026
0.385
0.048
0
0
0.389
1.157
12
Owens machines were only licensed under strict conditions that many glass manufacturers found irksome and some found unacceptable (Biram36). Other engineers therefore
continued their efforts to make smaller, cheaper, and more flexible machines. Most of these
were two table blow-blow or press-and-blow machines: these terms refer to the main method
of forming the parison and then the final article. For some reason suck-blow (which would
apply to the Owens machine) was never used. These machines usually had parisons being
formed in moulds mounted on one table and the final articles blown in moulds mounted on
the other: these are described below.
Well-run Owens machines gave notable increases in several important aspects of container quality: uniformity of dimensions, weight and capacity being the most important.
However, the Owens process suffered from one technical defect that proved impossible to
eliminate. The base of the container always had a fold in it caused by the chilled tail of glass
inevitably made as the parison mould lifted and the knife severed the glass still attaching it
to the pool (Dingwall37). This cut-off scar was a weakness but not very important so long as
the base of the bottle was thick but it became an important problem as containers became
lighter and their walls thinner.
OTHER SUCTION MACHINES
Some other machines using suction gathering were developed and quite widely used. In 1920
the British Redfern38 machine was installed at Castleford in Yorkshire specifically to make
whisky bottles. It operated in the same way as the Owens machine and looked very similar
but differed in many details; there were six, ten, and fifteen arm versions. It was designed to
operate with much longer intervals between being stood down for cleaning and servicing.
However, it arrived too late to become a serious competitor.
Emile Roirant39 (18821955), a brilliant French engineer who liked frequently to
remind his colleagues, Always remember that any fool can make a complicated machine,
was more successful because he initially addressed a different market, the many European
manufacturers who worked on a much smaller scale and with little capital. His first
successful machine (type B, Fig. 8) was introduced in 1922. It had one set of moulds
and could be wheeled up to a working hole intended for a glass-blower. Most of the operations were controlled by a cam about 1 m in diameter mounted on a transverse horizontal
axis. Many such machines were sold to small firms in Europe. The Roirant A6,
introduced in 1928 was a six station intermittently rotating machine for the usual range
of containers; the Roirant B2, patented in 1928, made containers of capacity from 10 to 60
L at a rate better than 1 per minute. Roirants last machine, the R7 (not suction-fed),
was introduced in 1950; it was a very efficient compact continuously rotating single table
machine.
The Monish40 machine, made by Moncrieff in Perth was also quite widely used
between about 1930 and 1950; its name was a combination of those of the company and
the inventor, McNish. The Monish Major was a one table rotary semi-automatic machine
with three sets of moulds and needed only 2 hp to run it. A paddle in the forehearth pushed
the glass chilled by gathering out of the way before the next gather was made. The Monish
could make up to 1100 gross of 90 to 180 mL bottles per week and needed very little
maintenance.
13
Fig. 8. The Roirant type B machine. Operations are controlled by cam A; parison mould B is also
shown in gathering position B; blow mould is at C.
FEEDERS AND FOREHEARTHS
Blow-blow and press-and-blow machines need to be supplied with gobs of glass from a
forehearth and feeder. The forehearth conditions the glass so that it is at constant uniform
temperature and the feeder forms the gobs and drops them into the moulds at the right
moments. The early development of such machines was retarded by the lack of a good gob
feeder but the possibility of success was first demonstrated by Homer Brooke,41 born in
Yorkshire but then working in New Jersey or New York, who patented a feeder in 1903.
The Brooke gravity gob feeder relied on cup-like moulds mounted on arms rotating
about a vertical axis and flat knives rotating in the opposite direction to interrupt a continuous stream of glass falling from an orifice. When the mould of the glass forming machine lay
below the orifice, the stream fell directly into it. When sufficient glass had been delivered
the stream was interrupted by a cup and severed by a knife, the cup collecting the glass until
the next mould was in place. The cup was then tilted to dump its accumulated glass into the
mould, see Figure 9. This method had the obvious disadvantage of the glass cooling as it was
collected in the cup, so that it would not flow uniformly when blown and the wall thickness
of the ware would be randomly variable. There was also a tendency to entrap air bubbles as
the stream fell into the cup. Despite these disadvantages, the Brooke feeder was taken up for
cheap wares by several companies including Ball Brothers and Hazel Atlas: the latter
obtained their own patent for a similar device, with shears above the cup, in 1925.
14
Fig. 9. Brookes gob feeder showing sequence of (1) filling mould; (2) interrupting stream;
(3) collecting glass in cup whilst mould moves on; (4) cup tilting to fill next mould, and (5) glass
falling directly into mould.
The Hartford-Fairmont Syndicate had been established in 1912 specifically to make

new and improved machines that could compete with the Owens machine. They therefore
had to take up the challenge to develop an effective gob feeder. One of the engineers whom
they employed was Karl E. Peiler, an MIT graduate, and he worked on that project, among
many others, during much of his long career of 42 years.
At first Peiler42 tried to mechanise the actions of a hand gatherer, see Figure 10, but
soon had to abandon that method. However, the much more sophisticated control devices
now available mean that such feeders can be bought today and are used for especially heavy
articles such as large television screens. Next he tried using rather more viscous glass which
fell through an orifice that was provided with an adjustable central needle to control the
flow of glass and shears below the orifice to sever the glass when required. An intermittent
flow was provided by a paddle that moved back and forth just behind the orifice. This
Fig. 10.
Peilers first gob feeder reproducing a hand gatherers actions.
15
paddle-needle feeder,43 Figure 11, was introduced in 1915 and 120 of them were in use three
years later (Meigh44). It turned out that they gave best control of gob weight and shape when
operated considerably faster than one machine required and so were often used to feed two
or three machines. It will be seen below that this diversion of the gobs from one orifice to
different paths was a notably useful development.
Peiler45 continued to seek a better method and introduced the first model of what has
become the standard type of feeder in 1922. Dowse and Meigh46 reviewed the current development of gob feeders in 1921; Swain47 wrote another well illustrated review ten years later.
The modern feeder uses flow through an orifice which has a concentric tube just above it and
a central plunger which can be moved cyclically up and down (Figure 12), the effect of its
motion being largely confined by the tube to the glass in and around the orifice. This makes
it possible to accelerate flow of glass out of the orifice as the plunger moves down and to
retard or even reverse the flow as it is moved upwards. The gap below the tube is adjusted to
control the average flow.
The viscosity of silicate glass melts varies very rapidly with temperature according to
the TammannVogelFulcher equation (Cable48), see Figure 2,
log g = A + B/(TT0 )
where A, B, and T0 are constants depending on glass composition. Maintaining a constant

gob weight thus requires very close control of the temperature of the glass and that is the
main function of the forehearth. If gob weight, hence also the capacity of the container, are
to be kept to within 1%, the viscosity may not vary by more than 1%. For a typical glass
being fed at 1200C this means keeping the temperature constant to within little more than
plus or minus 1C, a remarkably tight standard.
The main functions of the forehearth, which has the gob feeder mounted at its far end,
are to carry the glass from the furnace to the machine and achieve the constancy and uniformity of temperature that the feeder requires. This is achieved by using a relatively wide but
shallow enclosed channel with numerous sets of small gas burners fitted in the side walls
above the stream of glass along its whole length and also means to supply cooling air above
the surface of the glass. By adjusting these ways of heating and cooling the glass can be
thermally conditioned even if its temperature in the working end of the furnace varies. Peiler
and his colleagues also worked on these problems, introducing improvements step by step
and in 1944 produced the first version of the type forehearth still widely used today, see
Figure 13.49 Rotating the tube that forms part of the feeder mechanism maintains a flow of
glass around the nose of the forehearth and avoids the glass at the tip becoming chilled.
COMPETITORS FOR THE OWENS MACHINE
Most of the inventors of smaller more flexible competitors for the Owens machine adopted
the use of a gob feeder and the principle of mounting parison moulds on one rotating table
and blow moulds on another, the parison being transferred from one to the other where the
two tables came closest together. At first the tables only carried the moulds, typically six, so
that each table had to be rotated one sixth of a revolution then stopped whilst externally
mounted components, such as blow heads, performed their function, see Figure 14. The
earliest versions needed both a gatherer and a boy to transfer the neck ring holding the
16
Fig. 11. The Hartford paddle needle feeder shown (1) at the beginning of gob formation
and (2) just before raising the needle and severing the gob.
17
Fig. 12. Essential parts of the modern type of

Hartford feeder. (A) Glass in the forehearth;
(B) reciprocating plunger; (C) rotating tube;
(D) orifice; (E) shears.
Fig. 13. A typical forehearth showing the series of gas burners along the sides and the cooling
system. In the main part of the channel the glass is cooled to the temperature needed by the feeder
and then, in the equalising section, the temperature made as uniform as possible.
parison to the blow table; the first machines to obviate this manual transfer were known as
No-Boy machines. It was soon realised that mounting some of the operating components on
the tables themselves, so that operations could occur whilst the tables were moving, would
save a lot of time, power, and wear, and increase efficiency. Some machines were then made
to rotate continuously but many other retained an intermittent motion which made it rather
easier for every gob to drop cleanly into the mould.
Table 3 makes clear the economic pressure to produce improved machines in the 1920s
when glassmaking was recognised as an industry with very high labour costs. The type of
machine was not specified, the data are presumably typical values. Figure 15 shows how the
continued rapid growth of production in the USA was mostly due to these machines once
competitors of the Owens became available.
18
Fig. 14.
Typical layout of a two-table blow-blow or press and blow machine.

TABLE 3
Increase in efficiency of glass container machines over hand manufacture (United States, 1927)
Type
of ware
Increase in
Productivity
%
Decrease in
Labour cost
%
4 oz Pharmaceutical
0.5 pint Soda
1 pint Whisky
1 quart Milk
5 gallon Carboy
4110
1640
742
1449
994
97
93
90
95
83
Fig. 15. Early growth of container production

by machine in the USA showing popularity of
gob fed machines once they became available.
19
Some of the most popular machines were made by the Lynch Corporation50 and by
ONeill,51 both based in the USA. The two tables were usually linked directly by gearing,
sometimes around the rims of the tables themselves to ensure accuracy of alignment, which
was especially important at the station where transfer of the parison to the blow mould took
place.
A brief review of the development of ONeill machines may help to understand how
progress was made (Moody52). The first ONeill machine was a power driven press first
made in 1893; it was fed by glass from a ladle passing between two rolls that shaped
it somewhat before it dropped into the mould. It proved effective and popular, thereby
helping to convince glass manufacturers that their future lay with machines.
The first ONeill blow-blow machine to sell in appreciable numbers was the No. 20.
This was a rather odd type, in effect two machines built back to back, a central pillar carrying two parison moulds each of which supplied two blow moulds on a small rotating table:
Ashleys early machines had several parisons and one blow mould. After considerable further development work the semi-automatic No. 21 was produced. It may be considered the
prototype of the later series of machines, having six parison (or blank) moulds on one table
and six blow moulds on the other table but it still had to be fed by a gatherer and a boy had
to remove the parison, turn it over and transfer it to the blow mould; the same boy removed
the finished bottle from the blow mould. Obviously the machine rotated only intermittently,
the drive being pneumatic. Compressed air was used to ensure that the glass filled the neck
ring completely and then to blow the parison.
Important advances were incorporated in the No. 25 machine which also had six
parison and six blow moulds. The parison mould was turned upright before reaching the
transfer position; transfer to the blow mould and removal of the finished bottle were also
done automatically: this was one of the first No-Boy machines.
Experience indicated that the parison could be formed more quickly than the final
article could be blown so the No. 28 machine, for larger ware, had six parison moulds and
eight blow moulds. However, the first of the No. 30 series for smaller ware returned to six of
each.
The engineering of the No. 40 series was improved, being sturdier and using ball and
roller bearings where none had been used before. All of those machines were driven by
compressed air, the consumption of which was ever increasing. The No. 50 series was
therefore provided with electric drives.
Improved models of the No. 30 series were then produced with a 3 hp electric drive, PIV
gearbox and used one heart-shaped cam. The timings of up to 15 pneumatically operated
actions could be varied over wider ranges than before. One of these lines could be for
vacuum to aid formation of the finish.
Electric drives were obviously most suitable for continuously rotating machines. Some
intermittently moving machines were also driven by continuously running electric motors
via Geneva drives to produce the required motion but more relied on pneumatic piston
drives which could give quicker acceleration and deceleration. Widespread use of compressed air for pneumatic drives was rather obvious when the air was needed for blowing
and for mould cooling. Pistons operated by compressed air were also much easier to fit to
machines that needed motions in several different positions and directions than having
direct mechanical links for all operations. The compressed air was usually supplied at 23
20
atm pressure but, as ONeill noted, when machines became larger and faster it could become
very costly to provide as much as was needed for all purposes.
Pneumatic drives for numerous separate operations were also kinder than direct
mechanical links when mishaps occurred and made various possible failures, such as pieces
of broken bottle lodging in unfortunate places, less catastrophic. They also allowed rates of
motion to be adjusted. Their popularity was thus no surprise.
Giegerich and Trier53 described all the types of machine in use when their book was
published. Some machines were developed with both sets of moulds mounted on one table,
like the Owens machine, for example the Roirant R7 and machines made by Mitchell54
in Bradford. When one considers the billions of containers that one machine could make,
the number of machines that any manufacturer could expect to sell must always have
been small and profit margins not likely to be very encouraging. It is therefore rather surprising but gratifying that so many talented engineers have devoted themselves to the glass
industry. The United States was long the country with the biggest markets, the largest glass
companies, and thus the obvious home for many developments.
THE INDIVIDUAL SECTION MACHINE
The Hartford company also worked on machines for making bottles and in 1924 Henry
Ingle invented a machine that was eventually to make all others obsolete. This was the Individual Section or IS machine. Although the basic operations are the same as with other
gob-fed machines, the engineering is completely different. As the name indicates each pair of
moulds on this machine can act separately from the others; this has obvious advantages
when repairs or servicing are necessary. Ingles machine has an inverted parison mould on
one side sitting above the neck ring which is mounted on an arm that swings vertically
through 180 to transfer the parison to the blow mould on the other side. The moulds themselves remain stationary, except for opening and closing: the IS thus shared some important
features with Ashleys original machine. The basic operations of the blow-blow IS machine
are shown in Figure 16. Although a patent was applied for in 1924, the patent was not
granted until 1932 (Ingle55), presumably because the patent examiners could not recognise
the uniqueness of the machine.
The IS machine had many advantages apart from being able to continue operating
some sections whilst others were being serviced. Much smaller masses of metal had to be
moved and most of the crucial operations were operated pneumatically by adjustable contacts fitted to grooves in a large diameter rotating drum in the base of the machine which
gave both accuracy and flexibility of the timing of many of the operations. Having the
moulds always in almost the same positions made it easier to design efficient mould cooling.
In the early days a typical IS machine was built from either four or five sections joined
together, side by side, and driven from the same drive shaft. This required use of a distributor to send each successive gob to a different section of the machine but such devices had
already been developed for use with the paddle needle feeder. The first commercial four
section IS machine was installed at the Carr Lowrey works in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1927.
Today 12 and 16-section IS machines are common. Large machines need two separate
forehearths and gob feeders to supply them.
21
Fig. 16. The basic operations of the IS machine.

(1) Gob drops into inverted parison mould;
(2) baffle in place and blow down applied;
(3) guide ring removed and parison blown.
Centre, parison swinging over to blow mould
position; (4) parison enclosed by blow mould and
reheating; (5) bottle being blown;
(6) finished bottle standing on base plate.
IS machines were expensive and few were installed in Europe before the mid 1950s but
very few other machines have been installed anywhere since about 1970. A number of firms
developed other more advanced variants of two table machines, for example Heye56 in
Germany, but by that time the IS was so widely used and well supported across the world
that any other machine, however good, found it impossible to establish a secure foothold in
the industry. This was also partly due to the continued development of the IS machine, as
has been described by Edgington and Drummond.57 Double gob operation (using a mould
with two cavities to make two articles at the same time) was introduced in 1939. The
Vertiflow cooling system (Foster and Jones58), developed around 1980, was a particularly
important advance; it uses vertical passages, which may vary in cross-sectional area, drilled
in the mould wall for cooling by compressed air. This gives much more efficient wellcontrolled and less noisy cooling than relying entirely on forced convection cooling of only
the external mould surfaces. Electronic control was installed from 1974.
A press and blow process, Figure 17, for wide-mouth articles such as jam jars was introduced in the USA in 1939. However, one of the most important of all developments towards
the end of the last century was the introduction of narrow neck press and blow operation
which is now very widely used. This variant allows pressed parisons to be made for almost
all types of container; one of its most important features is the ability to control exactly the
wall thickness of the parison, something that is necessary to make light weight single trip
22
Fig. 17. Parison formation by the wide mouth press and blow process
on the IS machine.
23
containers with thinner walls. Numerous other developments have been made but not yet
used commercially; for example providing an intermediate neck ring mould between parison
and blow moulds to allow more cooling of the finish (Jones59).
IS machines are usually used to make containers of capacity up to about 1 litre; slight
modification of a standard machine to make an 8 litre container weighing 2.2 kg was
recorded by Thorpe.60
THIN-WALLED WARE
When Michael Owens became a teen-aged glass-blower, cylindrical glass chimneys for oil
lamps were still important products. His first patented invention related to those. They were
made by blowing in a paste mould, that is a mould internally coated with a porous layer of
carbonised material which is used wet. The steam produced by blowing the hot glass against
the wet wall of the mould extracts heat from the glass and prevents close contact of the two
which means that the surface of the glass retains its bright mirror finish and is very little
damaged by contact with the mould. Rotating the glass in the mould smoothes out some
irregularities and prevents appearance of a vertical seam where the two halves of the mould
fit together. Paste moulds can only be used where the amount of heat that must be removed
from the glass is little more than is needed to evaporate water, so it is limited to thin walled
wares like lamp chimneys, drinking glasses, and electric lamp bulbs which are only around
1 mm thick.
Soon after 1913, when the US General Electric Company introduced tungsten filaments, electric lamp bulbs were needed in rapidly increasing numbers and blowing by hand
could no longer keep up with demand. A semiautomatic machine was invented in 1912 by
Chamberlain61 and used by Corning Glass Works and a four arm Empire machine, patented
in 1914 (Pitt62) also became widely used. In 1919 Turner63 reported that the United States
produced more than 200 million bulbs a year. Many bulbs were still made by hand and
Turner noted that the American system, which employed a gatherer, a blower, and an
unskilled assistant could produce 1200 to 1300 bulbs in a 9 hour shift; yet the British system
where every blower worked alone produced 800 bulbs per person in a 8 hour shift. The need
for an automatic machine was obvious.
One of the most versatile and successful was the Westlake, another machine from
Toledo, Ohio, the basic patents being obtained by Kadow64 in 191518. Both the Empire
and Westlake machines were clearly based on copying the skilled blowers series of operations. Those of the Westlake, which made two bulbs on each of its twelve arms, are shown in
Figure 18: a pair of small gathering moulds shoot forward into the tank and are filled by
suction, on retraction the gobs fall onto the upturned ends of two blow pipes where they are
gripped by neck rings and blowing begins; after several puffs and partial collapse of the
embryonic bulb, the blow pipes swing through 180 and the parisons are enclosed by the
blow moulds, in which they continuously rotate as they are blown, finally the neck ring
opens to release the bulb and the mould drops down into a bath of water. The Westlake
machine does not need the rotating pot necessary with the Owens machine because the small
size of the gathering moulds and short contact times do not greatly chill the pool of glass
during gathering.
Dralle and Keppeler65 claimed only 45000 bulbs/day as normal for a twelve arm (24
blowpipe) Westlake in 1923 but said that only eleven such machines made over 100 million
24
Fig. 18. Sequence of operations on the Westlake machine. (1) Gathering by suction;
(2) dropping gob onto blow pipe; (3) plug raised and gob gripped; (4) parison blown;
(5) parison sagged; (6) blowpipe turned over and bulb blown.
25
Fig. 19. The Corning ribbon machine for lamp bulbs. (1) Rolls shaping stream of glass;
(2) blow heads engaging upper edge of glass ribbon; (3) parisons forming through holes in
plates; (4) blow moulds rising from water bath; (5) blow mould opening to release bulbs;
(6) blow head raised; (7) bulbs cut from ribbon and collected.
bulbs that year in the USA. Nevertheless, the market for lamp bulbs seemed insatiable and
that led Corning Glass Works develop a completely new type of machine. This, the Corning
Ribbon or 399 Machine66, was conceived by W.J. Woods but largely developed by D.E.
Gray, Cornings chief engineer, around 1926. Woods was, like Owens, an experienced glass
blower who had become factory superintendent. The machine, see Figure 19, has a linear
layout. A ribbon of glass carried horizontally in a straight line on a series of metal plates
passes between two caterpillar belts. Blow heads are mounted on one belt placed above the
ribbon and and blow moulds are carried by another such belt below the ribbon. Holes in the
metal plates supporting the ribbon allow the glass to sag through and the blow heads contact the upper surface of the ribbon to do the blowing. As the bulbs begin to form the blow
moulds (wetted paste moulds) rise from below, enclose the parisons and rotate whilst the
bulbs are blown. At the other end the blow moulds open and drop away leaving a string of
bulbs hanging from the now solid ribbon from which they are cracked off and collected.
The machine was so unusual that the patent contains 18 pages with 47 beautifully
drawn diagrams which identify more than 350 components, as well as fifteen pages of text.
Preston67 reported that the original machine had a ribbon moving at 0.6 m/s and could make
up to 300 bulbs per minute. A version to make containers was patented but not exploited.
The first ribbon machine to be installed outside the USA began operation in Yorkshire in
1950 and even today only a few of these machines, which have been improved but never
superseded, can make almost the whole worlds supply of light bulbs (Suey68).
Westlake machines or their direct descendents remain in use today for small-scale lamp
bulb production and for the manufacture of thin walled drinking glasses, including some
wine glasses with a short neck and foot. Emhart developed a popular rotary paste mould
machine, the H-28 in the 1930s. A later version of that machine is still widely used for
tableware (Edgington and Drummond57).
26
Small low voltage bulbs for torches and suchlike are generally made from vertical
lengths of tubing placed in much smaller rotating machines where the bottom end of the
tube is reheated and worked as the machine rotates (Mickley and Thomas69).
EFFICIENCY
The most efficient machine is the one that can make a given container at the greatest rate
with minimum rejects. Shaping the molten glass can be done very quickly, even with the low
pressures of the compressed air that are used; opening and closing moulds and moving
from one operation to the next can also be done quickly. In general it is the removal of
the heat from the glass and then from the moulds that determines the overall rate of
manufacture.
Giegerich70 devised a very useful simple scheme for analysing and comparing the performance of different machines. The overall rate of manufacture is clearly given by the rate
at which gobs are supplied but, as two moulds are used, the time to make each container can
be almost double that and the maximum efficiency would be achieved by parison forming
and blowing to final shape each taking the same time. Although opening and closing moulds
must require some time, as must cooling the mould before it can be used again, Giegerich
considered all such time as wasted. He therefore divided the whole cycle into four stages: the
times for forming the parison tP, reheating it tR, blowing the final article tB, and cooling in
the mould tC, the total time tT to form one article obviously being the sum of these, see
Figure 20. The interval tL = tG 0.5tT between a parison being removed from its mould and
the next gob being charged represents the lost time.
Giegerich established several interesting correlations between operating parameters
such as gob weight and the times needed for the various stages on a range of machines.
Figure 21 shows just one result: how the rate of production varied with tT for containers of
Fig. 20.
Giegerichs method of analysing machine performance, see text.
27
Fig. 21. Productivity of different machines

making bottles of the same range of weights
(Giegerich). IS = IS machine; B and R7 are
Roirant machines; LA and L 10 Lynch
machines; AG, AP, and OS are Owens
machines. The Owens machines and Roirant B
were suction-fed.
the same weight made on different machines. The upper dashed line shows the maximum
efficiency that would result if there was no lost time and the two parts of the cycle each
needed exactly the same time; the lower dashed line represents half that. Although the
Roirant B machine comes closest to the upper line, it operated quite slowly; the best
overall performance was given by the IS machine and the next best was the Roirant R7. The
superior performance of the IS machine owes much to its method of operation, construction, and more efficient mould cooling. Some of its other advantages have already been
described.
DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION
Glass making machines work in arduous conditions, running continuously for days, even
weeks, at a time in a hot environment whilst accurately repeating a sequence of quite complex operations. Careful design can minimise the need for servicing and allow necessary
servicing to be quickly done. Even today, as the moulds on a machine do not operate in
steady-state conditions, it may take several hours to regain maximum production after any
interruption. It is therefore important that moulds, although held rigidly and accurately,
can be released and changed very quickly when necessary. The ability to stop only one section at a time is thus an important advantage of the IS machine but impossible on a rotary
machine.
It has already been implied that few machine manufacturers could employ large teams
of design engineers, so many machines underwent continuous modification and improvement. The open literature contains a few papers that examined various aspects of design and
development. The construction and operation of presses which use the simplest method of
manufacture, was discussed by Nichols71 and some other aspects of pressing by Gill.72
A symposium held by the Society of Glass Technology included descriptions of many
of the types of machine then in use but also some critical examination of their performance
and problems. Amongst those papers, Nichols,73 who was vastly experienced, noted that
some machines with rather poorly lubricated plain bearings were not initially fitted with
bushes by the manufacturers and he showed that spring performance could often be
improved by changing the size of wire and number of turns used.
28

CONCLUSION
Although the manufacture of automatic machines for making glass containers is a very
small section of the engineering industry, many skilled engineers have devoted their talents
to this branch of manufacturing and glass makers have been very well served by their
machine suppliers. The most efficient methods of making both bottles and thin-walled ware
such as lamp bulbs were established seventy-five years ago. Steady progress has been
made ever since to keep improving the quality of the wares, productivity and operating
conditions.
The exact requirements for the most efficient processing of glass containers are, even
today, rather difficult to define exactly and much development was until recently the product of insight, trial, and error. Computer modelling is now widely used for several aspects
of design and operation but is not yet able to achieve all the targets set. Present practice
pushes materials and technology to their limits but the glass industry is always seeking to
make further improvements that can decrease the weight of glass used to make a container
and increase speed of manufacture.
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30
40. J. Moncrieff Ltd and A.L. McNish (a) Improvements in rotary machines for manufacturing
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31
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Trans. Newcomen Soc.

The Mechanisation of Glass

Copyright The Newcomen Society 2006 all rights reserved

THE MECHANISATION OF GLASS CONTAINER PRODUCTION

Fig. 1. Undesirable distribution of wall

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THE MECHANISATION OF GLASS CONTAINER PRODUCTION

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THE MECHANISATION OF GLASS CONTAINER PRODUCTION

Fig. 2. Typical viscosity-temperature curve

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THE MECHANISATION OF GLASS CONTAINER PRODUCTION

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THE MECHANISATION OF GLASS CONTAINER PRODUCTION

Fig. 3. The press and blow

Fig. 4. Ashleys original plank

Fig. 5. Ashleys later version of the original machine. Parison

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THE MECHANISATION OF GLASS CONTAINER PRODUCTION

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THE MECHANISATION OF GLASS CONTAINER PRODUCTION

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THE MECHANISATION OF GLASS CONTAINER PRODUCTION

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THE MECHANISATION OF GLASS CONTAINER PRODUCTION

Fig. 7. Section through the parison mould head of an Owens

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THE MECHANISATION OF GLASS CONTAINER PRODUCTION

* Two sets of moulds per arm

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THE MECHANISATION OF GLASS CONTAINER PRODUCTION

OTHER SUCTION MACHINES

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THE MECHANISATION OF GLASS CONTAINER PRODUCTION

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THE MECHANISATION OF GLASS CONTAINER PRODUCTION

The Hartford-Fairmont Syndicate had been established in 1912 specifically to make

Peilers first gob feeder reproducing a hand gatherers actions.

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THE MECHANISATION OF GLASS CONTAINER PRODUCTION

where A, B, and T0 are constants depending on glass composition. Maintaining a constant

COMPETITORS FOR THE OWENS MACHINE

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THE MECHANISATION OF GLASS CONTAINER PRODUCTION

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THE MECHANISATION OF GLASS CONTAINER PRODUCTION

Fig. 12. Essential parts of the modern type of

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THE MECHANISATION OF GLASS CONTAINER PRODUCTION

Typical layout of a two-table blow-blow or press and blow machine.

Fig. 15. Early growth of container production

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THE MECHANISATION OF GLASS CONTAINER PRODUCTION

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THE MECHANISATION OF GLASS CONTAINER PRODUCTION

THE INDIVIDUAL SECTION MACHINE

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THE MECHANISATION OF GLASS CONTAINER PRODUCTION

Fig. 16. The basic operations of the IS machine.

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THE MECHANISATION OF GLASS CONTAINER PRODUCTION

Copyright The Newcomen Society 2006 all rights reserved

THE MECHANISATION OF GLASS CONTAINER PRODUCTION