Courtesy of Owens-Illinois Glass Company Collection, Ward M. Canaday Center, University of Toledo
Courtesy of Owens-Illinois Glass Company Collection, Ward M. Canaday Center, University of Toledo
Look out your window. Take a sip of cool water out of a clear tumbler. Open up a jar of fresh pickles. Scrape the ice off your car windshield. Swipe your finger across an iPhone screen. Put on your bifocals. Check yourself in the mirror. You’re surrounded by glass, but do you know what it took to bring this ubiquitous resource into our daily lives?
The three-thousand-year-old story of glass-making is an epic tale of intrigue, sabotage, espionage, murder, poison, prison, bankruptcy, tyranny, and revolution. For centuries, glassblowers were sworn to secrecy. The masters of fire and sand guarded their recipe books like highly classified nuclear codes. In the thirteenth century, zealous Venetian rulers went so far as to imprison glassblowers and their families on the island of Murano. Those who attempted escape risked criminal prosecution and state execution. At the turn of the twentieth century, artisan guilds and glass workers’ unions used their muscle to stifle competition.
Regressive vigilantes jealously destroyed innovative technology to protect their jobs and halt manufacturing advances. They were a real pain in the . . . glass.
So, how did the champions of progress defeat the defeatists? West Virginia coal miner’s son Michael Owens and New England industrialist’s son Edward Libbey played a critical role in modernizing glass manufacturing that is little known and rarely celebrated by anyone outside of their industry peers, hometown elders, and collectors. Owens and Libbey transformed the glass-making process from ancient hand-blown craft to full-blown machine automation. Together, they created or fueled more than two hundred companies, many of which continue to thrive and innovate today.
Owens the inveterate tinkerer and Libbey the consummate entrepreneur defied the monkeywrenchers, risking their fortunes and their lives. They endured economic crises, strikes, protracted patent battles, and myriad technical obstacles. Their extraordinary partnership yielded breakthroughs in lightbulb and kerosene lamp production, bottle-making, standardization of pharmaceutical packaging, mass-manufacture of flat glass and auto glass, and the invention of fiberglass. Once a luxury item for elites only, elegant glass tableware was brought to the masses by Owens and Libbey. They helped make the manufacturing process safer and eliminated the industry’s reliance on child labor. Owens’s mechanical genius paved the way for lower production costs, higher output, and unprecedented uniformity of product quality and size.
To fully appreciate this pair’s enduring industrial successes forged in America’s heartland, we begin this journey of glass in the wild and treacherous empire of ancient Rome.
Take the Kardashians, add the Sopranos, dress them all up in togas and sandals, and behold: You’ve entered the wacky world of Roman emperor Tiberius Caesar. His mother, Livia, was an insatiable social climber. His aristocrat father, Tiberius Claudius Nero, fled Rome with Mark Antony after the assassination of Julius Caesar. After returning home from exile, lascivious Livia caught the attention of ambitious Octavian. Pregnant with her second child, she dumped her hapless hubby and shacked up with Octavian (later Augustus, the first emperor of Rome).
During the reign of Tiberius Caesar, unsurprisingly, the troubled emperor descended into depression, sexual debauchery, and vengeance. Tiberius was a total sleazebag. He dragged more than fifty of his enemies into court for phony treason trials and executed dozens. Ever-scheming Livia, the Roman Mom from Hell, is rumored to have poisoned several of Tiberius’s rivals, including Germanicus, two of Augustus’s grandsons, and perhaps even Augustus himself.
In short: Tiberius Caesar and his insane family seized power, held it, and abused it by any means necessary. Which brings us to the legend of vitrum flexile.
The very first glass-makers came from ancient Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, but Roman conquerors and traders get the credit for adopting, adapting, and spreading early glass technology across Western Europe and the Mediterranean. “Glass was present in nearly every aspect of daily life,” a Roman art history specialist noted, “from a lady’s morning toilette to a merchant’s afternoon business dealings to the evening cena, or dinner.”
Under corrupt Tiberius Caesar’s reign, according to separate accounts by ancient historians Pliny, Petronius, and Dio Cassius, a guileless glassmaker happened to visit the emperor’s palace. The craftsman brought with him a brilliant transparent vessel used for pouring libations to the gods. It may have looked like the same ritual offering vases found in typical Roman households. But this was no ordinary tableware. The gift was made of flexible glass (vitrum flexile), which the inventor proudly demonstrated by hurling the unbreakable object to the floor. The impact left nothing more than a small dent, which the emperor’s guest miraculously repaired with a hammer (matriolum) he had brought along for the sales pitch.
As legend has it, Tiberius asked the glassmaker if anyone else had been informed of his breakthrough technology. He excitedly told the truth: Tiberius had been the first to learn of it. But instead of greeting the revelation with glee and offering a reward, the tyrant swiftly ordered his guards to drag the flexible glass creator away and chop off his head. If the invention were known, Tiberius feared, “gold would become as cheap as mud.”
Then, as now, disruptive innovation posed a fundamental threat to the economic status quo of the ruling class. Tiberius feared that the advent of vitrum flexile would undermine the value of Rome’s precious metals. This murderous dictator and his central planners cared more about protecting workers in the existing copper, silver, and gold industries than in pioneering anything new. They simply could not imagine how many more jobs, industries, and riches might result from pursuing the untried and untested. Competition and creativity were public menaces. Violent suppression, stasis, and government coercion were the cures.
Lush, tranquil, and unearthly, the sparkling island chain of Murano in northern Italy hardly seems like jail. But in the thirteenth century, the Great Council of Venice (Maggior Consiglio) turned the marshy lagoon outpost into a de facto detention facility—a veritable Gitmo on the Mediterranean. The powerful Venetian council had been clamping down for decades on lucrative, luxury-glass artisans in order to create a tightly run government monopoly. In 1275, the rule-making body issued an edict banning exportation of sand or any other glass-making ingredient. Next, the politicians ordered the destruction of all high-temperature furnaces in Venice. Using fire hazards as a pretext, the city expelled all of its glassmakers from the mainland in 1291. Along with their apprentices, foremen, and furnace stokers, the maestros of glass were forced aboard ships and gondolas for a three-mile, one-way trip to Murano.
As long as they did what they were told, the artisans were treated relatively well. Their overlords gave them all the resources they needed for their art. But the velvet-handcuffed craftsmen risked life and limbs if they divulged their secrets or tried to escape. Venice’s secret police would be dispatched to hunt them down to the ends of the earth.
For three centuries, the isolation plan worked. The trapped Murano artists brought bountiful glory and riches to Venice. But as Tiberius and the Roman Empire went, so went the Venetian monopoly on glass. Knowledge of glass-blowing spread despite the watery boundaries and oppressive rules enforced by the Venetian government. Many of the workers successfully escaped to Vienna, Belgium, France, and England. Others were targeted and lured away from the island by covetous foreign potentates.
In the mid-1600s, vain King Louis XIV was an insatiable customer of Murano glass. He had purchased thousands of pounds’ worth of renowned Venetian mirrors and wanted more, more, more. The Sun King’s top minister of industry and arts Jean-Baptiste Colbert hatched a plot to bring Murano glass-makers to France. A nefarious junk-shop merchant working for the French embassy in Venice infiltrated the island and scraped together three shady Murano glass workers (one a murderer of a priest). They all accepted large bribes and tax exemption promises to set up shop in Paris. The French ferreted away nearly two dozen of Murano’s senior master mirror-makers, their journeymen, foremen, tool-makers, and metal polishers “aboard moonlit gondolas by secret agents” to work for Colbert’s Royal Company of Glass and Mirrors—and they took all of their country’s trade secrets along with them.
In 1684, after Colbert and his operatives gathered enough intelligence from the Murano glass-makers to continue mirror production on their own, King Louis XIV introduced the world to the resplendent Hall of Mirrors (Le Galerie des Glaces) at the Palace of Versailles. The dawn of Louis XIV’s age of opulence signaled the end of Venice’s stranglehold on luxury glass. However, a new cycle of government command and control would soon commence and grip the European continent.
This tumultuous and tyrannical backdrop set the stage for a radical technological revolution that would forever change the way the world made and used glass. To the ancient batch recipe of silica, alkali, and lime, the American mavericks of glass would add the freedom-enhancing ingredients of capitalism, enforceable and salable patents, automation, and mass production.
But first they had to get rapacious King George III and the Redcoats off their backs.
COME, join Hand in Hand, brave AMERICANS all,
And rouse your bold Hearts at fair LIBERTY’S Call;
No tyrannous Acts shall suppress your just Claim,
Or stain with Dishonor AMERICA’S Name.
In FREEDOM we’re BORN, and in FREEDOM we’ll LIVE
Our Purses are ready,
Steady, Friends, Steady,
Not as SLAVES, but as FREEMEN our Money we’ll give.
—“The Liberty Song,” John Dickinson, 1768
A century after French and Italian potentates battled for control over glass blowers and manufacturers, British rulers faced rising dissent from their own subjects who yearned to produce their own goods and services without the yoke of government oppression. American poet, pamphleteer, lawyer, and champion of liberty John Dickinson galvanized his countrymen against tyranny. He played a critical role in leading citizen protests against Mother England’s odious Stamp Act in 1766, which the panicked Brits repealed after a disastrous four months. The colonists’ victory, however, was short-lived and bittersweet. Savvy Parliamentarians and then–prime minister Lord Rockingham tied passage of the Stamp Act repeal to passage of the Declaratory Act, which reasserted that Parliament “had, hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and vitality to bind the colonies and people of America . . . in all cases whatsoever.”
Translation: We rule, suckers!
Money-grubbing British bureaucrats needed to milk their subjects for revenue and reassert control over their unruly domain across the pond. They didn’t set up colonies to make their own stuff and compete with the merchants and manufacturers of Mother England. They demanded that the audacious colonists send back to them their best natural resources in bulk. Then, they demanded that the colonists buy the finished goods from the Brits. America’s rulers forbade their subjects from making their own goods. Instead, Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Townshend (Britain’s Chief Bagman) crusaded for a new set of onerous import duties and the creation of a tax compliance police squad headquartered in Boston—where resistance to the Stamp Act had been most virulent. Parliament enacted a package of four laws in Townshend’s name in 1767. The revenue would be used to pay the salaries of the colonial governors and magistrates. By commandeering the power of the purse and nullifying the colonists’ ability to withhold salaries from corrupt or incompetent executives and officers, Townshend plotted to seize control over their local assemblies and legislatures.
Now, everyone remembers the infamous tax on tea that would soon serve as the last straw for the Sons of Liberty. But the very first commodity targeted by the Townshend Acts was precious glass, upon which would be levied:
For every hundred weight avoirdupois of crown, plate, flint, and white glass, four shillings and eight pence.
For every hundred weight avoirdupois of green glass, one shilling and two pence.
The Brits and their loyalists argued that since the Townshend duties were “external” (as opposed to the “internal” confiscatory penalties of the Stamp Act), they weren’t reaaaaally taxes. But Dickinson, author of “The Liberty Song” and the influential “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies,” spelled out the ruse. The Townshend Acts were:
. . . expressly laid FOR THE SOLE PURPOSE OF TAKING MONEY. This is the true definition of “taxes.” They are therefore taxes. This money is to be taken from us. We are therefore taxed. Those who are taxed without their own consent, expressed by themselves or their representatives, are slaves. We are taxed without our own consent, expressed by ourselves, or our representatives. We are therefore—S L A V E S.
Nineteen of twenty-three colonial newspapers printed Dickinson’s “Letter from a Farmer” between 1767 and 1768. The Boston selectmen, including John Hancock and Samuel Adams, added their clarion voices after a historic town hall meeting in October 1767 at Faneuil Hall. The patriots drew up a target list of British goods and organized America’s second major round of political boycotts (which were modeled after the successful nonimportation agreements pioneered by the Sons of Liberty in response to the Stamp, Sugar, and Currency Acts). The Boston leaders also agreed “to promote Industry, Economy, and Manufactures” domestically to avoid “the unnecessary Importation of European Commodities which threaten the Country with Poverty and Ruin.”
At the top of the list of local industries to nurture and support: glass and paper.
The unruly dissenters put their money where their mouths were: British exports plunged from 2,378,000 pounds in 1768 to 1,634,000 in 1769. Defiant Americans, men and women alike, tarred and feathered the British tax collection squad. A furious King George sent the Redcoats, whom colonists were forced to quarter, to occupy Boston. Resistance and riots over the Townshend Acts precipitated the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770. The next month, Parliament partially rescinded the Townshend Acts (retaining the tax on tea). But it was too late and too little. The Revolutionary War die had been cast.
As they brought British merchants to their knees through mass boycotts, colonial leaders worked hard to catalyze commercial self-sufficiency. The Founding Fathers took a deep and abiding interest in encouraging new manufacturers. Benjamin Franklin, who needed glass for his groundbreaking inventive activities (electricity, the glass armonica, pulse glass, and later, bifocals), befriended German immigrant Caspar Wistar and his family. The industrious soap merchant turned forge owner had founded America’s first profitable glass factory in the 1730s in Salem County, New Jersey. Wistar’s glassworks made glass electric globes for Franklin’s electricity experiments and produced glass for the lab instruments of colonial Philadelphia mathematician, astronomer, and inventor David Rittenhouse.
As early American beer and whiskey makers multiplied, the demand for glass bottles grew. Beer-brewer and vineyard owner Thomas Jefferson courted glassmakers. Swiss immigrant financier Albert Gallatin, who would go on to become Jefferson’s Treasury secretary, invested in a glasshouse in New Geneva, Pennsylvania. The entrepreneurial endeavors of the Founding Fathers were invaluable down payments on the future of glass in America. By the turn of the nineteenth century, Pittsburgh glassmaker Benjamin Bakewell and New England glass mogul Deming Jarves had launched remarkable, profitable ventures.
The son of English immigrants, Jarves received several patents for improvements in pressing techniques, mold design, furnace design, and methods of coloring glass. While European glassmakers had produced pressed glass before him, it is Jarves who “is due the credit for perfecting and putting into practical use the art of pressing glass.” By the 1850s, his company had more than five hundred employees. Like other glass innovators before him, Jarves faced violent threats from “protective brotherhoods” of master glassmakers:
The glass blowers on discovery that I had succeeded in pressing a piece of glass, were so enraged for fear their business would be ruined by the new discovery, that my life was threatened, and I was compelled to hide from them for six weeks before I dared venture in the street or in the glass house, and for more than six months there was danger of personal violence should I venture in the street after nightfall.
The very first tumbler produced from Jarves’s labor-saving pressing device was put on public display at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876. The company expanded from production of exquisitely blown and cut tableware into chandeliers and fancy centerpieces, telegraph insulators, pharmaceutical ware, and door knobs. But with success came growing labor agitation, family disputes, and management conflicts, which prompted Jarves to separate from the company in 1858. He died in 1869. After a crippling national glass workers strike in 1887, the Boston and Sandwich Glass Company extinguished its furnaces and closed its doors forever.
But Jarves’s legacy lived on in another company he had cofounded in 1818, the New England Glass Company, which would fatefully bring together two of the most important American giants in modern glass production: Michael Owens and Edward Libbey.
Michael Joseph Owens, still in his britches, skipped grade school and went straight to work. The third of seven children of poor Irish immigrants John and Mary, young Mike started toting lunch and water buckets to his father’s coal mine at the age of nine.
“My father was a sort of genius. He could build anything, from a wheelbarrow to a boat,” Owens reminisced. He would fly kites and attract gaggles of delighted children. But the lackadaisical elder Owens played when he should have been working and “worked at the thing he hated.” Owens credited his father with passing on to him the “inventive instinct,” but it was his mother who trained him with the “practical sense” and “great energy and purpose” he needed to succeed. At ten years old, the scrappy kid had his own full-time job. “I was born in Mason County, West Virginia, in 1859,” he recounted, “and my father was a miner. I wasn’t. But I worked at a job that I guess was just as hard. We moved to Wheeling when I was ten years old; and as my folks were poor and we had a large family, I went to work in a glass factory.”
The name of that company was Hobbs, Brockunier, and Company, a flint glass factory founded by former employees of Deming Jarves’s New England Glass Company (NEGC). John L. Hobbs was a glass-cutter. James Barnes was the furnace engineer who helped Jarves pioneer the “red lead” process. Hobbs and Barnes moved down to Wheeling, West Virginia, because of its cheap and abundant supplies of coal and natural gas—used to fuel the glass furnaces. The region also boasted railroad lines and the Ohio River, a valuable transportation hub. When Barnes died, Hobbs joined with Charles Brockunier, his new bookkeeper and company partner. Hobbs also brought in William Leighton, son of NEGC’s Thomas Leighton, who had patented the “Boston silvered door knob” made of mercury glass for NEGC. Leighton served tirelessly as scientist and superintendent for the new venture. Hobbs’s son, John H., also joined the company and succeeded his father upon his retirement in 1867. The company won industry renown for its perfection of lime glass, which could be produced much more cheaply than flint glass at the same high quality, as well as its fancy crackled, opalescent, and “Peachblow” colored art glasses.
Child labor was a staple of the glass industry. Girls worked in the packing rooms, polishing and wrapping glass products. “Blowers’ dogs” or “dog boys” as young as eight served as workshop helpers. A glass-blower would remove a “gob” of molten glass from the furnace with a hollow iron blow pipe. He would expand the glass and shape it by blowing through the pipe and swinging it. A finisher would use a solid iron rod called a pontil and an assortment of wooden tools to work the glass into its final shape. Or the glass could be pressed into molds (as pioneered at the New England Glass Company). A shop of three skilled blowers and finishers would need three or four young boys. The “holding-mold boy” opened and closed iron molds for the glassblower. The “ketchin’-up boy” stood beside a presser “receiving tumblers from the large mold on a little tray and placing them on a little table at his side.” The boy who grabbed the blown or pressed glassworks with a long iron rod and fired them in the reheating furnace for the adult finisher was the “sticker-up boy.” And the lad who ferried the finished objects to the annealing oven was the “carryin’-in boy.” Mike Owens described his own gritty duties maintaining the furnace flames:
“At that time, bottles were made by hand. The workman would blow a bottle, and then it had to be reheated so that the rim at the lip could be formed. To do this, the bottle was held with what were called snaps and thrust into a small round furnace in a pit. Boys were hired to feed the coal into this furnace. . . . That was my job when I was ten. I worked five hours in the morning; and when I came up out of the pit I was as black as that ink there. I went home, washed clean, ate my dinner, and went back for another five hours in the afternoon.”
At many factories, an employee (the “knocker-upper” or “knocker-up”) would be tasked with rousing snoozing workers. This would never have been a problem for the diligent Owens. During his rest periods, the indefatigable Owens worked even more. He used the precious down time to practice blowing glassware by imitating the masters he assisted. At eleven, he became a “carryin’-in boy” and then advanced to mold-holding. By 1880, some six thousand boys between the ages of ten and fifteen (one-quarter of the glassmaking workforce) were putting in ten-hour days, six days a week, for as little as thirty cents a day. Social welfare advocates and union leaders lobbied government authorities to crack down on the scourge of child labor in the glass industry, which exposed many to abuse, illness, and death. But Owens (whose manufacturing innovations would ultimately eliminate the problem in a way that no regulation could have ever achieved) had a decidedly different view of his early work experience.
“Work never hurt anyone!” he scoffed to a reporter. The conditions under which glass boys might work might hurt them, he acknowledged, “[b]ut the hard work I did as a boy never injured me. I went to bed early and I went to sleep without losing a minute. . . . In the factory, I went through all the jobs which boys performed; and I enjoyed every bit of the experience. I wanted to learn everything there was to be learned. And as there were no unions then to put obstacles in my way, I did learn every step of the process; and at fifteen I was a glass blower, working alongside of men two or three times my age.”
A world away from the sooty furnaces of West Virginia’s Hobbs, Brockunier, and Company, another teen was getting early training in the glass industry. Five years older than Owens, Edward D. Libbey got his first taste of the glass life as a “chore boy” at the Cambridge, Massachusetts, headquarters of Deming Jarves’s New England Glass Company. Libbey’s father, William, had joined the company as its bookkeeper after training as a corporate clerk in another of Jarves’s businesses. He also served as manager of Jarves’s Mount Washington Glass Works, where he learned the art-glass trade. The Libbey family, a combination of merchants and Mayflower stock, was well-to-do and well-connected. Young Edward had received rigorous academic training first in Boston’s superior public schools, then at the private Kents Hill Academy prep school in Maine. He studied Greek and Latin, poetry, rhetoric, philosophy, and business. Accounts vary as to whether Edward wanted to become a Methodist minister or whether that aspiration was more his parents’ than his own. In any case, a damaging throat infection ended all plans for a career in public oration. Edward spurned college and instead returned to the glass factory to work. He had capitalism in his blood and didn’t have time to waste.
In 1874, as self-taught fifteen-year-old Mike embarked on his glass-blowing tenure at Hobbs, Brockunier, and Company, twenty-year-old Edward took a position as a clerk at the New England Glass Company—from which Owens’s employers had departed decades earlier. Though he was born wealthy, Libbey worked his way up from the bottom like any other apprentice. He traveled to Europe to study glass chemistry and history. He developed marketing plans, consulted on hiring decisions, maintained meticulous corporate records, and guarded the company’s “batch book” of glass recipes. He immersed himself not only in the business and promotion of glass, but in the craft. He had the heart of an art collector and would pursue his aesthetic passions as he built an industrial glass empire until death. Libbey began his career amidst a devastating economic depression and mounting competition. In 1883, his father died and Libbey inherited the company—along with its skyrocketing fuel, labor, and shipping costs.
For a few rough years, Libbey kept the company afloat through the sheer force of his artistic, marketing, and entrepreneurial savvy. Thanks to patents the firm held on pioneering employee/inventor Joseph Locke’s eye-catching Amberina and Peachblow colored art glass, the New England Glass Company found creative ways to boost sales in the high-end market. Locke also produced the patented Pomona, Agata, and Maize art glass for the company. Amberina was initially considered a failure by Libbey’s father before he passed. The Toledo Blade reported: “One day a batch of glass came through that was merely amber instead of ruby in color. Rather than waste the batch, workmen sculpted the usual pieces of glassware from it, but when the elder Mr. Libbey saw the off-color glass he made some off-color remarks and rejected it completely. It was placed in a warehouse and written off as a complete and expensive loss.”
Edward the aesthete, however, saw beauty in the accidental, two-toned creation, and he is credited with coining the name “Amberina.” More important, he spotted a golden-ruby business opportunity. As Libbey biographer and University of Findlay business professor Quentin Skrabec told it, Libbey “created a market, and he had the genius to bring the market and the technology together.” Libbey forged a licensing deal with Hobbs, Brockunier, and Company and other factories to manufacture Amberina, which was mixed with gold to produce a shaded ruby to amber gradient, in pressed glass. He then sold some of the company’s Amberina inventory to friend and fellow glass pioneer Louis Tiffany (yes, as in Audrey Hepburn and Breakfast at Tiffany’s). Amberina became all the rage in tableware and enjoyed several revivals during the next century. Libbey took out patents for other ornamental colored glass improvements and etched glass patterns as well, including his famous “Florence,” “Corinthian,” “Kimberly,” and “Kite” motifs. He “aggressively defended his patents,” Skrabec noted, and this vigilant commitment to the “defense of corporate intellectual rights was fundamental to the transformation of glassmaking from a craft to an industry.”
Employed at companies with shared DNA in a fledgling industry, it was still highly unlikely that the poor miner’s son from West Virginia and the privileged bookkeeper’s son from Massachusetts would ever cross paths—let alone work side by side their entire adult lives revolutionizing the glass business. Their orbits were about to collide in a most uncanny way. One of America’s most fruitful industrial partnerships emerged from economic hardship and labor turmoil. It was a convergence of two disparate business and mechanical geniuses who defied the historical forces of secrecy, obstructionism, and sabotage in their industry.
But before they stood with each other, Mike Owens and Edward Libbey stood against each other.
“OBEDIENCE TO THE MAJORITY.”
That was the cardinal principle of the American Flint Glass Workers Union, which first allied itself with the militant Knights of Labor, a secret society of tradesmen dedicated to replacing capitalism with worker cooperatives. The AFGWU then became a charter member of the organized labor powerhouse that evolved into the American Federation of Labor. The AFGWU roped in makers of glass lamps, lamp chimneys, prescription bottles, pressed ware, clear-glass bottles, stoppers, and art-glass engravers and cutters. Like the ancient guilds and European protective associations that preceded them, the “Flints” sought tight control over the methods, output, factory conditions, wages, and workforce of the glass-making business. From its founding, the Flints’ goal was to “equalize” the output and wages among all factories—regardless of differences in geography, demographics, and economics. They enforced draconian employment rules to repress nonunionism “that were stricter than those of almost any other national organization.”
Organizers limited the number of apprentices permitted to be trained per workshop and punished workers who finished more pieces per half-day than were deemed acceptable by the union. At its first convention in Pittsburgh in 1878, the AFGWU proposed uniform production rates based on the “output of the least productive plants and slowest workmen. Later, the union passed a radical resolution “call[ing] upon the workingmen of the world to unite under the banner of international socialism. Manufacturers balked. The glass industry, one Pittsburgh factory owner complained, was run by unions “trying to do what the almighty did not see fit to do—prevent one man from making more than another man.”
Agitation by the Flints and other glass-related labor unions swelled as organizers tried to dragoon workers at factories across New England, West Virginia, New Jersey, and Pittsburgh into their ranks. The Flints strong-armed nonunion workers in Massachusetts and led the strike that brought down the famed Boston and Sandwich Glass Company of Deming Jarves. The New England Glass Company was also on the Flints’ hit list as they pressed for geographic wage parity.
Among those on the front lines of the AFGWU brotherhood: Mike Owens. He was young, combative, ambitious, and articulate. Always striving for self-improvement, the devout Irish-American Catholic had sought tutelage in public speaking from his family priest. He practiced oratory in what little spare time he had at a local debating club and showed natural leadership as a labor organizer. Owens’s biographer Quentin Skrabec, Jr., notes that his commitment to the union “seemed more pragmatic than philosophical.” He was looking for opportunities to advance his career. The local flint glass workers’ union made him an officer and dispatched him to the convention of the national group in 1887 in Pittsburgh. The rank-and-file membership voted to strike at the New England Glass Company, and fiery Owens was credited as a key catalyst.
Libbey, under siege by these outside agitators infiltrating his factory, called the national committee “the wrecking squad.” Determined not to suffer the same fate as the defunct Boston and Sandwich Glass Company, Libbey made a bold decision and adopted an escape plan:
It was time to go West or die.
Once again, the story of glass became a story of survival. In a last-ditch effort to save his company from union saboteurs, Libbey relocated the New England Glass Company to Toledo, Ohio, and officially incorporated as Libbey Glass Company in 1892. The burgeoning and ambitious midwestern city aggressively courted the East Coast glassworks—offering land, homes for workers, and cash incentives, as well as convenient natural resources and transportation infrastructure. Natural gas was cheap and abundant. Coal was closer and more affordable. The region boasted high-quality sand deposits, Lake Erie (an ideal shipping route), and a major railroad hub. Now, Libbey needed to convince glassworkers to follow him.
A few hundred from East Cambridge reluctantly agreed to make the seven-hundred-mile journey by train with their families. Libbey widened his search. He placed newspaper advertisements in Wheeling, West Virginia, and traveled personally to interview candidates. Mike Owens recounted when the industrialist came to town on the recruitment drive that would transform both of their lives—and the world: Libbey “went to Wheeling for his workmen. I was one of them. A friend of mine, older than myself, was engaged as superintendent [in Toledo], but later decided to stay at Wheeling, so I wrote to Mr. Libbey and asked for the position myself.” Despite his success as a union officer, Owens wanted more. He didn’t want to stand in the way of progress. He wanted to lead the charge toward it. “I had become a glass-blower when I was fifteen. Now, thirteen years later, I was still a glass-blower. I didn’t think much of that as progress,” he explained. Work in Wheeling was irregular. He was tired of arbitrary production stoppages and precarious earnings. Libbey apparently didn’t hold Owens’s union organizing against him. While he rejected him for the superintendent’s position, the New England capitalist took on the hot-tempered Owens as a glass-blower in 1888. The risk paid off.
Three months later, Owens had replaced an aging, incompetent plant supervisor and made his mark as a foreman in Toledo. He fired hundreds of glassworkers who were lazy and drinking on the job. An incurable workaholic who showed up to the plant before sunrise and went full-bore twelve hours daily, he expected his workers’ energy and excellence to match his. Next, Owens took command as manager of Libbey’s rented glass plant in nearby Findlay, Ohio. Libbey Glass had landed a crucial contract in 1891 to manufacture glass lightbulbs for Edison General Electric after a strike hit its primary supplier, New York–based Corning Glass, which was an “open shop” (nonunion).
Two noteworthy factors worked in the favor of the team in Toledo:
1. One of Libbey’s top officials, Solon Richardson, had worked with Edison Electric on the East Coast, producing electric lightbulbs. After the move to the Midwest, Libbey Glass began producing bulbs for a few smaller electrical firms.
2. Owens had served as an officer with the striking Flints, who gave Corning glass employees the blessing to forgo their usual, mandated summer breaks and move temporarily to Toledo for work.
The hard-driving Owens oversaw the seventeen-month, high-stakes job, which reaped life-saving profits for Libbey Glass. Before the project, the firm “was suffering from a deficit of $3,000,” glass historian Jack Pacquette found. Seven months after the Findlay operation fired up, “there was a surplus of $50,000, and by January 1, 1892—after 11 months of production—the total Libbey enterprise was $75,000 in the black.”
Libbey enlisted Owens in a second, crucial entrepreneurial venture to secure the company’s financial viability. Modeling it after the Gillinder & Sons glass exhibit Libbey admired with his late father on a visit to the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, the aesthetic industrialist planned a spectacular glasshouse demonstration at the 1893 Columbian Expo in Chicago. His own board of directors opposed him, so Libbey raised money from private investors and put up his own personal funds. He secured exclusive rights to operate the only U.S. glass factory and pavilion at the fair. Libbey sent three hundred workers to staff the ten-pot furnace, including 150 glassblowers. Attendance was poor at first, until an employee suggested charging ten cents for admission (later raised to a quarter) and handing out souvenir stickpins decorated with Libbey glass bows.
The most popular displays and items featured at their palatial pavilion, which accommodated five thousand visitors at a time: a spun-glass dress made of Libbey Glass, keepsake inkwells blown on site, paperweights, and a room filled with sparkling glass furnishings. The Libbey pavilion’s “crystal art room,” lined with mirrors King Louis XIV–style, dazzled visitors with intricate cut-glass objects that glittered under bright light powered by George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla’s AC power. One enraptured reporter described it as a “room lined with diamonds.” A brilliant gamble, the lavish exhibit of glass-making manned by Owens and his team created white-hot buzz about Libbey Glass and sparked a craze in fashionable crystal. The firm’s cut-glass orders soared, as did its global reputation as the fair helped launch the “Brilliant Period” of American cut glass.
Libbey and Owens returned triumphantly to Toledo. Owens, of course, immediately went back to work. The management responsibilities Libbey conferred on his rough-and-tumble Irish union man soon set off the first revolutionary sparks of Owens’s creative genius. Though he couldn’t draw or read blueprints, possessed zero experience in industrial design, and had never studied mechanical engineering (let alone any other formal academic subject past the third or fourth grade), Owens had the heart, soul, and mind of a classic American tinkerpreneur.
He was visionary, stubborn, and practical.
He surrounded himself with skilled, gifted builders.
He never, ever rested on his laurels.
And he found his greatest inspirations in adversity.
A poem by Edgar Albert Guest served as Mike Owens’s office motivational poster. Tacked to his wall, the paean to persistence was titled “It Couldn’t Be Done”:
Somebody said that it couldn’t be done
But he with a chuckle replied
That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one
Who wouldn’t say so till he’d tried.
So he buckled right in with the trace of a grin
On his face. If he worried he hid it.
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and he did it!
Somebody scoffed: “Oh, you’ll never do that;
At least no one ever has done it”;
But he took off his coat and he took off his hat
And the first thing we knew he’d begun it.
With a lift of his chin and a bit of a grin,
Without any doubting or quiddit,
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and he did it.
There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done,
There are thousands to prophesy failure,
There are thousands to point out to you one by one,
The dangers that wait to assail you.
But just buckle in with a bit of a grin,
Just take off your coat and go to it;
Just start in to sing as you tackle the thing
That “cannot be done,” and you’ll do it.
“The dangers that wait to assail you.” Given his limited schooling, it’s unlikely Mike Owens was aware of just how much profound historical significance this line of his favorite poem carried. During the early years of the Industrial Revolution, the enemies of technological change targeted every conceivable machine that increased efficiency and productivity. The British legend of Ned Ludd romanticized working-class vandals who destroyed “Spinning Jenny” power looms and other textile equipment in wool factories across the English countryside. These anticapitalist anarchists were the Occupy Wall Street Movement of their time. Between 1811 and 1813, the so-called Luddites hacked away at thousands of wool-finishing machines with sledgehammers and axes, burned down warehouses, staged food riots, and murdered several factory owners and soldiers trying to quell the violence.
While America was spared such rampant and retrograde domestic terrorism, the Luddite virus manifested itself in other ways. Resistance was futile, but the Flints and other trade unions did their best to block or at least slow the adoption of automated devices and techniques in the glass industry. Owens and Libbey were not the first or only targets at the turn of the century. Big Labor devised multiple “antimechanization” strategies to protect their jobs, from fining rank-and-file union members who dared to use automated bottle-finishing machines to striking at chimney lamp factories that introduced a patented mechanical “crimper” to proposing the “highly unusual strategy of purchasing the exclusive licensing rights” of a patented device “in order to simply sit on the invention.”
At the Libbey Glass factory in Findlay, as mold boys threatened to strike, Owens devised a semiautomated mold-opening device. He enlisted the plant blacksmith, James Wade, to help him build it. As described in his Patent No. 489,543, approved in January of 1893, they created an “apparatus for mechanically operating paste glass molds,” which were used to mold fine glassware or lightbulbs and required wetting before each operation of molding. (At this point in the development of glass, human blowers were still needed in the manufacturing processes of products that hadn’t been fully automated, including bulbs, tumblers, bottles, and lamp chimneys.) Instead of relying on mold boys to assist in opening the molds, Owens envisioned a foot pedal that could be used by the glass-blower. The innovation eliminated some twelve hundred mold boys industrywide and “brought the price of a sixteen-candle-power incandescent bulb down to eighteen cents [from about fifty cents], which helped bring electric lighting to the homes of average Americans.” With the full faith and financial backing of his business partner Libbey, Owens secured several more patents for automated glass-making equipment—each growing in awesome complexity with applications for the manufacture of glass tumblers and lamp chimneys. In 1895, for example, Owens secured a patent for an “apparatus for blowing glass” that traded lung power for machine-blown air. He explained in his filing:
Heretofore in the art of blowing glass, there has been a blower necessary, who manually blows the article into the desired form, there being a gathering boy to secure the gathering upon the pipe previous to blowing, and remove the moil after the article is formed and removed from the pipe.
This invention has for its object to mechanically blow the glass and dispense with the blower, it only being necessary for the gathering boy to secure the gathering upon the pipe and place it upon the apparatus and remove the same when the article has assumed the desired shape.
Soon after came an improved “mechanical glass-blower” that automated the movement and transfer of the blowpipe through a complicated system of cranks, shafts, levers, flexible tubes, movable shaping blocks, and movable pedestals mounted on cars that traveled on tracks connecting a glass factory’s furnaces. Owens plainly spelled out the benefits:
It will be seen by the foregoing that in the use of mechanical means for carrying out the process of blowing glass the necessity of skilled labor is dispensed with, the work greatly facilitated, and the labor materially lightened by reason of the weight being sustained by the apparatus, and the use of one operator dispensed with.
Yet another breakthrough led Owens to invent a semiautomatic contraption that blew lightbulbs into carbon-coated molds. The machine featured five rotating arms, each with a mechanical blow pipe and a mold on the bottom. Here’s how it mimicked hand-blown production:
A glob of molten glass would be picked up onto the pipe, the mold would surround it, and compressed air would blow the glass into the mold. The machine could produce 2,000 bulbs in five hours. While it actually took more workers to produce bulbs using this method, they no longer had to be skilled workers, thus reducing costs.
The molds could be varied and replaced, adaptable “to a great variety of uses,” Owens disclosed. These would include glass tumblers and lamp chimneys. Key to later advancements in food, soft drink, alcoholic, and pharmaceutical packaging, the device ensured uniformity impossible to achieve through hand-blown, lung-powered glass manufacturing. By “means of the absolute control of the air-pressure,” Owens wrote, “the quality of the work done by the machine is superior to that heretofore produced.”
Owens and his engineers and designers formed an unprecedented industrial research and development team. Meanwhile, Libbey provided a top-notch legal team to defend and enforce the patents assigned to their company. He promoted innovative licensing and leasing arrangements that expanded the company’s market penetration at home in the U.S. and abroad. As Owens’s creations grew more sophisticated in size and operation, so did Libbey’s corporate empire. In 1896, he formed the Toledo Glass Company as a spin-off of Libbey Glass to enable Owens to concentrate exclusively on inventing. The team scouted out like-minded glass inventors, making deals to buy their patents or bring them on board. This unleashed further inventive activity and breakthroughs by creating a market trade for patents. Economists Naomi Lamoreaux and Kenneth Sokoloff point out that this revolutionary ability to trade patents allowed creative individuals to make money off their ideas and use the returns to specialize in inventive niches.
Again, the unions attempted to intimidate adopters of new glass technology. They tried and failed to shut down a Pittsburgh company that purchased rights to an Owens lamp chimney machine. Undaunted, Owens moved on to bigger, better things.
What Owens lacked in formal education he made up for with four decades of total immersion in the tools, equipment, and processes of the glass industry. What he lacked in artistic ability and engineering skills he compensated for with the gifts of conceptualization and verbal communication. His renderings on paper and blackboard were crude and elementary. But the same oratorical prowess and forceful personality that vaulted him into union leadership helped him convey to his builders and makers the machinery in his restless mind. After dictating every last detail, he’d order the team to “Put it in iron.” When the fantastic idea of a towering, fully automated contraption of iron and steel that could blow glass bottles at high speed came to him, Owens informed his boss and then paid a visit to share his new epiphany with Father Mullenbeck of St. Ann’s Catholic Church.
Father Mullenbeck marveled at the meticulous, graphic description Owens provided and counseled him against telling too many outsiders:
“From what you’ve told me, I could go out and have this machine built.”
For the next five years, Owens and his primary engineer, William Emil Bock, along with assistants Richard LaFrance, Bill Schwenfeier, his mechanic brother Tom, and others, toiled away at the design. Libbey put up $500,000 to support the research and patiently managed the rest of his often-squabbling executives and competing corporate interests. Team Owens built parts and prototypes whenever and wherever they could: at the office, in other Libbey-owned buildings, or in Bock’s basement all hours of the day and into the midnight shift. “You would laugh at the first device we made,” he joked with a journalist years later. “But the basic idea was there. The giant machines we build now have grown out of that idea.” The biggest automation stumbling block involved the time-worn gathering process of retrieving molten glass from the furnace, which had been performed by gaffers and gathering boys since the glory days of crazy Tiberius. The team conceived and Owens improved a “sucker-upper” built on the concept of a bicycle tire pump to gather the glass in uniform quantities and inject it into molds forming the necks of bottles. Next, Owens had his makers transfer the gather into a body mold, where the “return stroke of the plunger blew the glass into proper shape.”
The first successful product of the principle: a perfect, four-ounce jar for Vaseline petroleum jelly. He had his proof of concept. In 1903, Owens demonstrated a trial machine (known as “Number 4”) that incorporated five of the bicycle pump–style arms (“heads”) on a rotating circular frame. The device—which featured a whopping ten thousand parts—produced eight narrow-necked pint beer bottles in one minute. In 1904, Owens received his historic Patent No. 766,768 for the “glass shaping machine” that was “entirely automatic” and blew forms (be they bottles or anything else) “without the intervention of any labor whatever.”
The usual obstructionists tried to prevent the spread of this efficient and astonishing technology, which, as the National Child Labor Committee acknowledged, had done more than any government regulation to end child labor abuses—not to mention its salutary effect on promoting safe and healthy packaging practices for beverages and drugs. American Luddites destroyed bottles produced at one Owens licensee’s plant in Newark, Ohio. Union workers boycotted Toledo Glass and a new, Libbey-formed company, the Owens Bottle Company, which produced both the bottle-making machines and bottles.
But progress could not be stopped.
By 1900, fellow industrialist and inventor William Painter’s Crown Cork & Seal was supplying stoppers for Owens bottles. The synergy revolutionized the beverage business. The success of the bottle-making venture yielded job creation and growth in myriad related manufacturing areas. Libbey acquired scores of businesses ranging from glass container plants to mold makers, to sand, paper box, and melting pot firms. He licensed the machines worldwide, with production in Canada, Mexico, England, Germany, Holland, Austria, Sweden, France, Denmark, Italy, Norway, Ireland, and Japan, for starters. Owens continued to tinker, refine, and improve the machines, producing hundreds of new versions at his eponymous bottle company. Owens had made clear in his patent filing that the glass-shaping machine was not limited to bottles. During the next decade, he would create adaptations to produce everything from glass prescription ware to gallon packers.
“We are still finding new steps to be taken,” Owens said as business boomed. That is “the history of all achievement,” after all. “Nothing is ever finished and done with,” the tinkerpreneur mused.
The Crockery and Glass Journal reported that the firm’s total market value in 1919 was $27 million after its initial incorporation with $500,000 preferred and $2.5 million common stock. “While making profit for stockholders, the company’s product has reduced the price of bottles from twenty five to fifty per cent. The world as well the stockholders has profited.” By 1923, just twenty years after the first successful trial of his original automatic machine, ninety-four of every hundred bottles manufactured in the U.S. were being produced mechanically—either by the Owens machinery or by semiautomatic equipment made by others.
And they still weren’t done proving that what “couldn’t be done,” could.
Remember the legend of the hapless inventor who lost his head when he brought a sample of unbreakable glass to the ungrateful and insane emperor Tiberius? His workshop and recipes may have been destroyed, but his daring, inventive spirit infused the next two millennia of glass history. In 1922, another bold inventor held a demonstration of durable glass. It was Mike Owens. He held up a strip of one-foot-wide, three-feet-long glass for a reporter. “That is one of the most interesting developments in modern glass-making,” he asserted. Explaining how a Pennsylvania chemist pioneered the process of laminated glass, Owens marveled: “The extraordinary thing about it is that it does not break and fly to pieces like ordinary glass. Let me show you.”
Owens picked up a heavy paper cutter and slammed it into the glass a half-dozen times. Though some fine cracks appeared, the strip remained intact and nothing broke off. The implications for automotive safety were obvious.
The problem was that the lamination process, which involved inserting a celluloid layer between two panes of glass, required a radical new manufacturing method for flat glass. For two thousand years, artisans made windows by blowing cylinders of glass. “One side of the cylinder was then cut,” Owens explained, then reheated and flattened, “and the glass rolled flat.” Except it wasn’t completely flat. The ancient, time-consuming, and unreliable techniques for producing window glass retained a problematic curve. It had to be eliminated. But could it be done?
The man who pioneered and patented true flat-glass production and automation was engineer and inventor Irving Colburn. His Eureka! moment for manufacturing glass in a continuous, single sheet came from . . . breakfast:
Colburn’s inspiration came to him while eating pancakes. He noticed that after cutting the pancakes, the syrup clung along the length of the knife blade as he lifted it. It occurred to him that a sheet of molten glass could be pulled up in a similar manner. In his machine, the glass was pulled from the tank by the bait (iron bars), then bent over a steel roller and propelled through the annealing lehr on rollers turned by electric motors.
Colburn faced the same kinds of financial difficulties and union obstructionism that Libbey and Owens overcame. But he didn’t have their wherewithal. He had not forged the kind of critical business alliance Libbey and Owens had created. The clique of existing flat-glass manufacturers wanted no part of Colburn’s monopoly-busting ideas. The Knights of Labor stood against him. He faced rejection from dozens of glass companies. After begging and borrowing to keep his dream alive, Colburn reached out to Owens, who eagerly embraced the revolutionary idea of this kindred glass maverick. Libbey once again defied the naysayers in his corporate empire and backed Owens and Colburn.
In 1912, they approved Owens’s proposal to buy Colburn’s machine and patents for $15,000. Owens zeroed in on key mechanical flaws in Colburn’s design and embarked on a new, never-ending quest for improvement and perfection. The collaboration and close friendship with Colburn brought Owens full circle: He established a new sheet-glass production plant in his home state of West Virginia. Sadly, Colburn died in September 1917—one month before the plant went into full commercial production. But Owens and Libbey carried on.
The duo incorporated yet another new company, Libbey Owens Sheet Glass, and the sales team quickly and effectively spread word of the breakthroughs. Three years later, the company reported profits of $4.2 million, and European sales exploded. Millionaires many times over, Owens and Libbey separately pursued their passions (golfing and Catholic charity work for Owens; art collection and establishment of the world-class Toledo Art Museum, philanthropy, and travel for Libbey), but together continued in business until their deaths.
Owens died as he had lived: at work.
In December 1923 at a corporate board meeting of the Owens Bottle Company, as he passionately argued for new development proposals, he suffered a heart attack. Libbey paid generous tribute to his partner: “Self-educated as he was, a student in the process of inventions with an unusual logical ability, endowed with a keen sense of far-sightedness and vision, Mr. Owens is to be classed as one of the greatest inventors this country has ever known.”
Libbey passed away two years later after a bout with pneumonia. After their deaths, Libbey-Owens Sheet Glass merged with the Edward Ford Plate Glass company to form the Libbey-Owens-Ford (L-O-F) company, which produced the world’s first laminated auto safety glass for the Ford Motor Company’s Model A. The incessant experimenters at L-O-F later introduced residential solar energy panels in the 1940s and manufactured the glass for the Empire State Building in New York.
The company also invented Thermopane insulated window glass. That’s the protective, shatterproof glass used at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., to seal and protect original versions of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution—signed by the Founding Fathers who fought so tirelessly to promote the growth of American manufacturers and innovators in the useful arts.
Glass innovators faced mortal dangers and persistent existential threats from the days of Tiberius to Murano, through the Revolutionary War, and into postcolonial America. The mavericks of glass were assailed by naysayers who said it “couldn’t be done” and by jealous competitors who inveighed that it must not be done. Edward Libbey and Michael Owens combined forces to demonstrate the timeless entrepreneurial formula for success: ambition, profit motive, creativity, resilience, and the never-ending quest for perfection.