Evening News, Bridgeton, N.J. Tuesday, November 1906
Reprinted from "Crown Jewels of the Wire", May 1991, page 23
An Automatic Glass Factory
Wonderful Insulator Machine Which A
Young Man Has Invented
and Patented.
For the News.
The thrifty housewife who pours the luscious preserves into a
Mason jar gives little heed in the many hours of thought and study required to
place it in her hands for a few cents. She has doubtless heard of the
glassblowers, perhaps watched them at some fair, making festooned ships and
other curious souvenirs. And may know that bottles and other articles of glass
are blown in a similar manner, but does she know that her fruit jars, or the
pickle bottles or, in fact, any wide-mouth bottle is blown by automatic
machinery? It seems incredible, yet it is a fact. Automatic, working by itself.
Of this particular kind of ware, it must be admitted that it is only partly
automatic, for a man must take the liquid glass out of the glowing furnace,
while a second with a pair of shears clips just enough of the molten glass for a
Mason jar or a pickle bottle, then the molasses like stream is dropped into the
moulds which are closed and presto! there stands a Mason jar, hotter than the
goodies that will be poured into it later.
Some of those fruit jars have a metal top or cover which is screwed down upon
a rubber ring to seal it airtight. Another kind of glass which is worked
automatically is what is known to the manufacturers as pressed ware. Some of it
is along every country road, some of it is in every quarter of the globe, from
east to west, from pole to pole and from sea to sea. Without it the slow,
stately camel caravan would be without one of the surest guides over the sandy
wasteless Sahara and Arabia, and the farmer at the cross roads would have no
infallible method of directing the lonely traveler on his way. "Take the
first right hand road and then follow the greenish blue pieces of pressed
glassware, all the way." Stop to think: do you know of any manufactured
article that you can find in as many different places as glass insulators? Not
withstanding the countless millions of them that are used for electrical
services, they have been made exclusively by hand. Big or little ones for
telegraph or telephone, or for an electric cable that is charged with a current that would kill a herd of cattle, exclusively by hand, that is, by man power.
Moulds have been made and improved and various machines to make it easier, but
still men had to handle the material in all its stages of manufacture, and could
not make them any faster.
Some years ago a young man not yet in his thirties
found himself with an immense glass business on his hands, the largest of its
kind in the world. Every day the order clerk called for more ware, from every
part of the country came orders for insulators. With two men and three boys
working hard, 4500 completed insulators were turned out every ten hours.
Sitting
down in the factory with orders piling up on him the young man watched the men
slowly getting the glass from the furnaces, another cutting off the right
amount, and pulling the lever to press it into shape -- slow work, telephone calls
coming in, more insulators. At night he dreamed if only that glass would come
out itself and the mould would go whizzing around. At last after months of
experimenting, disheartening litigation, there stood perfected an automatic
insulator machine, automatic patented in every part and a success.
The young
many went to Old Bridge, N.J., and there he built the largest glass. tank in the
world, for making pressed glass, in which the glass is continuously in a
seething glow from week to week. There I saw the automatic machine with the
intelligence of a man. In the Brookfield Glass Company's plant. Great piles of
broken glass, sand, lime and other ingredients of this wayside sign board lay at one end of the
factory. Sturdy machinery, without aid of human hands, picks up just the right
proportions of each and carries them to a little bucket elevator. This dumps
them into a grinder and mixer, running all by itself; then a little car comes
along and takes the prepared material to the glowing furnace where it is
dropped in the greedy furnace. On the front side of the tank is the whirr of
machinery. There stands the wonder child of the young man's mind, but what a
giant to accomplish. So bright that the brain reels. A brilliant light, from the
furnace, a stream of white, a shirl, a tick, tick, tick, so fast you can hardly
count them as they come from the machine finished insulators, 20,000 a day of
ten hours with nobody around but our man with an oil can. Tick, tick, tick from
Monday morning at 7 o'clock til Saturday night at 12 o'clock, so fast that it
seems impossible. His dream came true.
"More insulators," yes four,
almost five times with this machine more than those two men and three boys could
make in one day. These men and boys are now working where they have not this
patented wonder. From this automatic wonder the insulators travel to a furnace
where they are annealed, cooled and come out to the packing room. Not a human
hand has touched them from the time the raw material is dumped into piles at one
end of the factory, until the packer puts them into the barrels to be sent to
the uttermost parts of the world.
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They don't write articles like this in today's Chicago Tribune. How about
your newspaper? This terrific 1906 story about Brookfield manufacture was sent
in by Don Wentzel from Millville, New Jersey. A great piece of history!
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