Glass Enters a New Age: Libbey-Owens-Ford Pioneers in Adapting an Old Industry to Modern Needs

A HUNDRED years ago the United States Government wrote into the homestead law the provision that a four-paned glass window should be built into every cabin. Dedicated to improving the common lot of mankind, the young republic legislated against extending into new country the dark cabins of the colonial and pre-homestead era, some of which may still be found in backward regions. Glass is a civilizer, and it is significant that the first factory in the United States was a glassworks established near Jamestown, Virginia, in 1608.

Glassmaking is one of the oldest of the industrial arts. In our day it includes processes ranging from primitive to ultramodern, and products all the way from exquisite smallness to gigantic proportions. Here is an outstanding example of the rise of modern technics, not only because of the phenomenal advances in the art, but also because lowered costs and prices have brought an amazing expansion of the use of glass in new fields and markets. Once a luxury, glass is now a necessity, and the glass house of proverb has become reality. This transparent servant of light, which you see through rather than see, has a noble past, a dynamic present, and a future which enthralls the imagination.

As this ancient art developed into continuous large-scale production of the commoner forms of glass, both inventive genius and commercial vision were required. Particularly has this been true of the manufacture of flat glass, where new processes forced heavy capital investment in enormous plants and massive machine equipment. The march of the glass industry into new fields of public service and convenience, its competence in gaining new objectives by technical improvements, and its determination to reach new markets through advertising, are illustrated in the record and methods of LibbeyOwens-Ford Glass Company.

I

The three names which this company perpetuates are those of men who pioneered this change in industrial processes. All three died between 1920 and 1925, their companies being merged in 1930. Each scored a distinguished business success, and each met fully the duties which the Middle West, perhaps more than any other section of America, lays on the doorstep of affluence. To become a leading citizen in that part of America, it is not enough that one shall merely make money; in addition to building a fortune, an industrial leader is also expected to build up his community and country, promote good works for social betterment, and show a disposition, when necessary, to forgo the profits of to-day for the sake of the long-range future.

These three glassmakers of Toledo did all these things — each in his own way, however, for they were men of distinct and widely differing personalities. Edward Drummond Libbey, for instance, was a New Englander who, deciding to move westward his small glassworks from East Cambridge, Massachusetts, brought to Toledo in 1888 a deep background of cultural tradition. To older Americans his name is almost synonymous with cut glass, that beautiful expression of craftsmanship which reached a style peak in the nineties, largely as a result of Mr. Libbey’s daring in exhibiting his manufacturing processes at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. This success established his company firmly, and as his fortune grew Mr. Libbey, true to the New England tradition, used it to promote education and art in his adopted city. The magnificent Toledo Museum of Art, housed in one of America’s noblest buildings, is largely maintained by a Libbey endowment, contains many magnificent paintings collected by him, and in connection with the public schools conducts a notable educational plan in art and music. Its glass collection is one of the finest in the world, with specimens illustrating all the changes of technics from the sand-core glass of ancient Egypt to modern pieces. Especially notable are a small Egyptian ewer of 1350 B.C., the famous Nekias cup of about 100 B.C., and a Roman cameo vase of the same period, the two latter timing the change from sand-core to blown glass.

In contrast to Mr. Libbey, ‘Mike’ (Michael J.) Owens belonged to that rough-and-ready school of American industrialists who rose from shirtsleeves to leadership by extraordinary vigor in organization and invention. Coming out of the West Virginia hills poor but full of fight, he became a glass blower and labor representative in the Libbey factory. In a crisis in its affairs, Owens rose overnight to the superintendency, fired all hands immediately, and then rehired the more efficient members of the staff. His inventiveness resulted in the Owens bottle machine, which revolutionized bottle making by reducing to automatism an art which from time immemorial had required hand gathering of glass and blowing by human lung power into required shapes. His vision and courage are revealed in the part he played in bringing to practical performance the fiat-drawing process, an equally revolutionary advance in window-glass manufacture, of which more later.

The third of the great Toledo glassmakers whose works are part of the Libbey-Owens-Ford heritage is Edward Ford, son of Captain J. B. Ford, America’s pioneer plate-glass manufacturer. Edward Ford, retired as President of Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company in 1896, resolved to establish a glassworks of his own. Toledo offered, then as now, certain sovereign advantages — trained labor, access by rail and water to markets, raw material, and cheap fuel. Purchasing 173 acres on the Maumee River adjoining Toledo, Mr. Ford began building the model town of Rossford for employee homes and constructing the largest plate-glass plant under one roof in the United States, with a capacity of 6,000,000 square feet per year, later doubled, and now six times its original capacity.

II

As one views window glass coming out of the furnace in a glowing carpet at the world’s largest window-glass factory in Charleston, West Virginia, it is a little difficult to realize that this automatic progression from melting tank to cutting machine is so new. Its birthday can be fixed in 1916, when the ideas of Irving W. Colburn, based on observation of paper making, were brought into practical use after Messrs. Libbey and Owens had spent more than a million dollars in developing the process, the patent for which they had purchased in 1912 through their Toledo Glass Company.

To comprehend the revolutionary character of the flat-drawing process requires a description of older processes. Casting of flat glass, in mediæval times, produced artistic effects still revealed in cathedral windows, but flat casting never attained commercial possibilities because of variations of quality, smallness of panes, and high cost. Better practical results were obtained by blowing glass into spherical shapes, reheating, and rotating until there developed a disk of glass marred by a bull’s-eye in the centre. America’s centre of production was Boston, and ‘Boston Crown glass’ became a trade name in colonial America. After annealing, the disks were cut into small panes, those with the bull’s-eye being used chiefly for transoms and door sidelights.

Larger panes resulted from another hand process involving exhausting physical labor and high skill, which came into general use early in the nineteenth century and continued to be the accepted method down to 1903. By repeated gatherings, blowings, and swingings of molten glass at the end of a heavy iron blowpipe, long cylinders were obtained, up to dimensions of twenty inches in diameter and seventy inches in length. The cylinders were then cut, reheated, and flattened; but the most skillful operatives could not bring to absolute flatness glass originally blown in cylinders. For this reason old window glass is slightly bowed and gives a considerable degree of distortion. Size and quality were limited sharply by human capacities under tremendous strain, and progress awaited a mechanical method for eliminating lung power and muscular fatigue.

The first step in that direction substituted compressed air in the blowpipe for the lung power of the glass blower. This made possible the fashioning of larger cylinders and sheets at less cost; but flattening the cylinders continued to produce the same defect until Libbey-Owens came to the rescue with the first workable machine for producing commercial flat-drawn sheet glass. Consistently improved through the intervening years, this process is the heart of the Libbey-Owens-Ford window-glass factories at Charleston, West Virginia, and Shreveport, Louisiana, both situated in natural gas fields. The Shreveport plant is the most southerly glass factory in the country.

Preliminary operations are similar to those in other forms of glass manufacture, but they proceed on so vast a scale in these great plants that a visitor may be puzzled in correlating the simple ‘shop’ glassmaking of olden days with this vast, automatic manufacturing programme. From railway cars the raw materials are run up by cup elevators into huge circular concrete bins, like farm silos, but much larger. From these the ingredients of the ‘batch’ are drawn by gravity — so much silica sand, so much ground limestone, so much soda ash and salt cake. These are the chief ingredients which from time immemorial have been used in glassmaking, but real progress has been made in controlling the mixture in both purity of materials, exactness in proportion, and thoroughness in mixing. After these materials have been thoroughly mixed in a power hopper, the batch travels along a broad band to the furnaces on a conveyor system nearly a quarter of a mile long, unloading being accomplished at any desired furnace. There, with a certain amount of cullet, or broken glass, it is fed into the furnace to be melted under a heat of approximately 2700 degrees Fahrenheit. Cullet, melting more quickly than the new materials, starts the liquefying of the mass and protects the sides of the tank from chemical action during the early stages. Even so the tanks must be frequently relined.

Eyes shielded against heat and glare by colored glass, the visitor peers through an observation hole into a tank of molten glass. What he beholds is a lake of glass five feet deep and more than a hundred feet long, but the optical effect is one of vast distances and weird, uncanny vistas. The colors of this lovely, ever-changing mirage are those not often seen on sea or land. Heat waves and convection currents explain the illusion of distance and the diffusion of light, but the layman will rest content with an unforgettable revelation of beauty.

This lake of glass in the great tank is ever being replenished at one end, and at the other end giving forth a broad carpet of white-hot, even-flowing metal. The endless carpet passes first through a chamber which cools the glass slightly by a short, sudden drop in temperature to toughen it in preparation for a straight upward pull to bending rollers, thence horizontally over flattening rollers, and into the lehr, for slow, thorough annealing. The powdered batch and broken cullet of a few hours ago have become fused into a solid transparent sheet; the white-hot fluid of an hour ago is now cool enough to be handled by cutters as it emerges from the lehr. The slow annealing possible under this flat-drawn process reduces internal strains and yields glass less brittle and hence more economically cut for glazing.

Glass cutting remains a skilled occupation, both in the manipulation of the diamond-pointed cutting tools and in the avoidance of waste by quick mental calculation to decide how a large sheet of glass may be best reduced to merchantable sizes and qualities. But even in this branch of flat glassmaking, which has withstood mechanical inroads longer than the others, machine tools march on. At Charleston, machine cutting is the established practice on large-quantity orders, and the prospect is that it will supersede hand cutting to a large degree because of the machine’s higher accuracy.

When you enter the great building few men are to be seen, which arouses the thought that men are being rapidly replaced by machines in this growing industry. Yet census statistics on manufactures show that 15,000 more wage earners were employed in making glass in 1929 than in 1899, a thirty-year period which includes all the major mechanical developments cited above. The answer to this apparent contradiction is to be found in the enormously increased use of glass due to decreasing prices, and cultivation of new markets for quantity-production glass. In this combined technical and commercial march of glass, labor shared to no small degree. The average annual wage in 1929 was two and onehalf times that of 1899. LibbeyOwens-Ford hourly wages to-day are much higher than in 1929, and even annual wages are about equal to those of 1929 in spite of the shorter working day in effect under code regulations.

III

So far we have been following window glass through the ultramodern flat-drawing process. Now let us consider plate glass, the ‘blanks’ for which can be made either by flat drawing, as at Charleston, or by the Bicheroux or pot method, as at the Rossford plant of Libbey-Owens-Ford at Toledo. In chemical content and physical form, window glass and plate glass may be identical; the difference between them is that plate glass must have further processing to produce the characteristics which give it superior market value. When window glass leaves the lehr, it does so as a finished article, requiring only washing, cutting, and inspection before being boxed for shipment, but when a plate-glass blank leaves the lehr it is still a ’blank,’semi-finished raw material requiring for completion even more work than has already gone into it. The blank must be ground and polished to close standards before it becomes plate glass ready for use as such, and these processes require both extreme care and large machinery investment.

On broad conveyors wider than flatcars and, like flatcars, moving on rails and in trains, the blanks, continuously bathed in water and sand which varies from coarse to fine, are carried under rotating grinders whose soft iron cores grind the corrugated surface away to parallel planes, thus eliminating distortion by taking off waves and surface irregularities. Then the conveyors carry the glass into the polishing machines, where, with soft iron oxide or ‘rouge’ as a mild abrasive, the glass is polished by felts rotating at high speed.

On the polishing line you will see an impressive example of that union of power and precision which distinguishes the whole machinesetup of modern glass production. It is known to a nicety how long those massive polishers with their whirring felts are at their best. Consequently an automatic crane at regular intervals methodically brings from above a new polishing battery whose felts have been reconditioned, and slips this mighty tool into place without a break in the movement of the gigantic ensemble. When you consider that this whole process is on a scale more massive than that of a railroad train, this marvelous timing seems a perfect triumph of factory engineering.

The surface, rather than content or thickness, distinguishes plate glass from window glass. The grinding and polishing of plate glass give superior clarity and uniformity of surface long recognized as a valuable factor in the manufacture of mirrors, in the display of goods in show windows and showcases, and plate glass is coming more and more into use in substantial and dignified residences. The ‘picture window,’ a phrase coined by Libbey-Owens-Ford and adopted by architects to describe a window framing an outdoor view, requires plate glass because of its freedom from distortion.

The most dramatic moment in a plate-glass factory like that of Libbey-Owens-Ford at Rossford, where the Bicheroux or pot method is used, is, of course, ‘the pour.’ As the furnace doors open, the beautiful yet awful majesty of fire is revealed. An immense incandescent pot of clay, holding more than 1500 pounds of molten glass, travels from furnace to rolling machine on an overhead conveyor. The contents spill out white-hot when the pot is tripped, cascade down between large iron rollers, and then continue down an inclined plane to come to rest as a flat, orange-colored oval perhaps twelve feet across by forty feet long. Power knives trim the oval into a rectangle and bisect it; then a door is lifted and the two great rough plates or blanks enter the annealing chamber and lehr, 450 feet long, to emerge 100 minutes later cooled down to the handling point. Then the blank goes on its way to the cutters, grinders, and polishers. The eye has beheld the glory of fire, and the mind has rejoiced in the power of man’s thought to harness those titanic forces to his service.

IV

When automobile manufacturers, about fifteen years ago, began building closed cars, they opened an immense new market for themselves and for glassmakers as well. Motoring became an all-year-round activity instead of a fine-weather sport. The utility of the automobile doubled, and the public increased its purchase of closed cars until they now form more than 90 per cent of total automobile production. From the start the automobile trade demanded plate glass, because of its superior beauty and clearer vision. The glass industry was faced with a challenge and an opportunity greater than it had ever known, since the call was not only for more glass and better glass, but also for glass on urgent production schedules matching in dynamics those of the automobile industry itself, which does not wait for laggards.

Obviously the use of even the best quality of plate glass, in a moving vehicle subject to collision, brought risks to motorists as well as blessings. Ordinary glass splinters on breaking; a shower of glass fragments is always dangerous and, as statistics of motor accidents show, often fatal. A survey a few years before the more general adoption of safety glass showed that more than 45 per cent of all motorists injured in accidents were cut by broken, flying glass. The search fora glass which would give greater protection to motorists led directly to the large-scale development of laminated glass, now generally known as ‘safety glass.’

Laminated or safety glass is a sandwich composed of two layers of glass, with a transparent layer of some tougher, more plastic material cemented between them. Early efforts to popularize safety glass failed because of the difficulty of finding a satisfactory middle layer. Certain materials then available served well enough from the standpoint of strength when new, but colored and weakened with age. Absolutely clear materials were hard to get, and under the influence of the sun’s rays cloudy and burned effects might soon appear which interfered with vision. Not until chemical engineers found means of producing plastic cellulose acetate from wood pulp or cotton at reasonable costs could the safety-glass trade reach its present proportions.

The laminating process is a delicate one requiring both high-quality glass and expert workmanship in assembly. After the plate-glass blanks have been ground, polished, and washed, they are cut to shape, coated with an invisible cement, and assembled with their in between layer of cellulose acetate. Under great heat and pressure the three layers, two of glass and one of plastic, are welded together into a completed transparent sandwich. After being washed and dried, it is dipped in acetone, which softens the edges of the plastic middle layer to the proper depth to allow for routing out and making room for weatherproofing the edges. All edges are then sealed, ground, and polished to finished form, and after a final bath and inspection the completed product goes on its way to the automobile body builder.

The advantages of laminated glass have long been recognized. Visibility is unimpaired, and flexibility and strength have been gained. Safety glass may crack under severe impact, may even break, but the likelihood of cuts from glass is greatly reduced, as the glass tends to adhere to the centre sheet of plastic. However, it was not until quantity production and improved plastic permitted great economies and betterments that the advantages of lamination became available to millions of users. Intricate problems of design and manufacture had to be solved in laminated glass production, yet the cost of complete equipment in an automobile is unbelievably small. Nearly all automobile manufacturers provide safety glass as standard equipment, and the rest offer it all-round as an option at approximately $10 for the average small car. At present more than half of all America’s motor cars are registered in states which have legislated in favor of safety glass, and 75 per cent of all new cars are being equipped with the protective material. With the continued encouragement of motor-vehicle bureaus and state legislatures, and the coöperation of the manufacturers, 100 per cent use of safety glass in the nation’s automobiles is in sight. The leading bus operators have already seen the wisdom of using safety glass throughout their fleets, even in areas where no legislation is in effect.

Outside of the automobile field safety glass is making headway. All airplanes are now completely equipped, and the trend to safety glass is on in other public conveyances where passengers must accept risks not of their own choosing. The recent Century of Progress Exhibition at Chicago developed another use, exhibitors using it to protect their goods from theft in locations where close attendance by employees was impossible. Other uses will develop, as is always the case when a formerly expensive product becomes available at low cost through improved processes and quantity manufacture.

V

Emphasis on the safety principle in glassmaking led Libbey-Owens-Ford into another departure in research and experimentation. After obtaining the rights to manufacture in America ‘tempered’ glass, a French development, and improving that process, the

Company now is beginning to produce a glass which of itself possesses exceptional tensile strength and marked safety features. In the laboratories at Toledo the visitor can see a glass ball weighing nearly two pounds drop from a height of eight to ten feet, strike a pane of glass, and rebound without leaving a mark. When the pane finally breaks under greater impact, it shatters into rather harmless granular fragments, some of them no more than powder, the breaking process being that of crystallization rather than splintering. You can usually dash a piece of this tempered or toughened glass on a tile floor without damage. Two men can stand on a strip of this glass, which bends under their weight like a wooden board and then returns to normal position. In Popular Mechanics, Edward Teale says that a large sheet of this glass, one inch thick, will support a three-ton truck.

Tempered glass is made by reheating plate glass in electric furnaces, then suddenly cooling it by special application of air blasts. Europe is using this kind of glass for many safety purposes. Thus far Libbey-Owens-Ford has found markets for tempered glass chiefly in portholes for naval vessels, for which it seems to be ideally suited. Its use is also ‘indicated,’ as the doctors say, for table tops, mirrors, plaques, shelves, oven doors, showcases, and perhaps even show windows.

VI

In the new age of glass so successfully inaugurated in the last few years, no single new exhibit arouses more interest than another Libbey-Owens-Ford product — Thermopane. This consists of two sheets of glass separated by a uniform dehydrated air space, the union being maintained at the edges by a dust-proof bond. Like laminated glass, Thermopane is a sandwich, but the filler is air instead of plastic. There is no decline in visibility. Until one examines the edges he is unaware that he is looking through two panes of glass instead of one, and it can be glazed in regular sash.

The advantages of Thermopane are such that it is displacing ordinary windowpanes in many better-class homes and apartment buildings. Air being one of the best nonconductors, Thermopane keeps out summer heat and in winter makes possible high fuel savings, estimated at 27 per cent. It also materially reduces street noises, which have grown to nuisance proportions in many cities. Thermopane is ideal for glazing air-conditioned structures, carrying control of interior conditions one step further, and considerations of quiet and health suggest it for hospitals, schools, and other buildings of a public and semipublic nature.

VII

Behind the Libbey-Owens-Ford organization, with its six huge plants engaged in making flat glass in enormous quantity by the most modern mechanical process, stands a great tradition. Its founders, in three distinct fields, led American glassmakers to new heights of accuracy and efficiency. Their successors, a group of men young in years but old in experience, most of whom have been in the glass business since youth, are taking a leading and constructive rôle in developing the new age of glass, one of the decisive phases in the revitalizing of American industry. They met the depression

head-on and checked it, as far as their particular business was concerned, by finding new uses for old products, developing new products through research, and creating a desire for those products in the minds of the public through steady and intelligent advertising. The result has been more employment. Libbey-Owens-Ford payrolls, both in numbers employed and in wages paid, have been going from one new high to another month by month, in contrast to swings in the opposite direction in many other lines.

One sees in the recent history of this company the creation of a new largescale industry — the manufacture of safety glass — and also a conscious acceptance of the responsibility laid upon industry to develop and popularize new products as a major contribution to industrial recovery. Internal developments such as these react definitely on the public welfare, and, being firmly grounded in economies, their cumulative effects are certain to be more enduring than external influences, arising outside industry, can ever be.

The Libbey-Owens-Ford Company’s record in the last five years has been a dramatic denial of pessimism, as it has proceeded to develop, through new ideas and vigorous management, the great possibilities latent in the ancient art of glassmaking. Even in a period of general hesitancy, the policy of courage which dictated progress in adaptations, research, and determined salesmanship won public acceptance from a people always eager for substantial improvements in the goods necessary to civilized living.

Copyright 1935 by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.