"Owens was an inventor. He was no designer, but he could direct engineers."
Richard LaFrance, Owens's chief of engineering
Michael Owens's (1859-1923) automatic glass bottle- making machine not only revolutionized the glass industry by speeding up the process of bottle-making and reducing its cost, it also helped the growth of several related sectors and eradicated child labor in the industry. At the time glassblowing was one of the most highly paid crafts, and children were often employed as cheap labor. In fact, Owens—who never received any formal education—started working at a West Virginia glass factory at the age often to support his family. He subsequently moved to Toledo, Ohio, to work for entrepreneur Edward Libbey, who gave him the opportunity to realize his inventive potential.
Building on existing concepts of similar semi-automatic machines (operated by five people), he conceived a fully automatic device in 1903. The suction of a vacuum—created by withdrawing the piston rod on the machine's hand pump—automatically sucked the required amount of glass into a mold. The resulting neck of the bottle was put in a body mold where the glass was automatically blown into the right shape. A conveyor belt then passed the bottles through a tempering oven to slowly cool them.
Owens's first device—which only required two workmen to operate it—had five pumps on a circular rotating frame and could produce about 17,000 bottles a day (six times more than the semi-automatic ones). At a time when glass was still a luxury item, Owens made it possible to produce bottles of identical sizes. With Libbey's help, hefounded his own bottle-making company, which still exists today. Modern machines are able to produce one million bottles a day.
