[Illustration: uncaptioned]
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, most bottles in the United
States and England were either free-blown—formed on the end of a
blowpipe without aid of a mold—or blown into a one-piece “dip mold” that
formed only the basic body shape. Neither of these processes allowed
large-scale production of oddly shaped or embossed containers, and since
even dip-molded bottles were formed by hand above the shoulder, the
bottles tended to be asymmetrical.
Hinged two-piece molds, capable of shaping the shoulder and neck as well
as the body of the bottle, had occasionally been used in England as
early as the 1750s, but they did not become common in the U. S. until
the second and third decades of the nineteenth century. A three-piece
mold with a dip body and hinged neck and shoulder parts, developed in
England shortly after the turn of the century, was popularized by an
1821 patent taken out by the Henry Ricketts Company of Bristol. These
two forms, especially the two-piece mold, remained the most common mold
types throughout the nineteenth century. On early two-piece molds, the
pieces were hinged in the center of the base, but a more stable mold
with a separate base part was developed by the late 1850s and was almost
universally used in the later decades of the century.
On almost all mouth-blown bottles, whether free-blown or blown in a
complex mold, the lip and upper neck were formed in a separate process
after the otherwise complete article had been removed from the blowpipe.
This process, the last step in the formation of the bottle, was known as
“finishing,” and the completed lip came to be called the “finish.” In
the early part of the nineteenth century, bottles were finished with
simple hand tools such as shears, but by 1840, a specialized “lipping
tool” with a central plug and one or more rotating external arms had
been introduced. This tool produced a smoother and more uniform finish,
and remained in use until the industry was fully automated in the
twentieth century.
While the finish was being formed, most bottles were held by an iron
pontil rod affixed to the base with molten glass. This process left a
rough scar on the bottom of the bottle where the pontil had been
detached. Holding devices which gripped the body of the bottle and
eliminated the need for empontilling were apparently known in England in
the 1820s, but did not become common in American glasshouses until the
1840s or 50s. By the 1870s use of the pontil rod had almost entirely
ceased.
The most significant American contribution to the early nineteenth
century glass industry was the development in the 1820s of the
hand-operated side-lever pressing machine. This device consisted of a
single- or multi-piece mold into which the glass was pressed by means of
a plunger. Since the plunging process required wide-mouthed molds,
pressing was used primarily for glass tableware, although straight-sided
jars were also pressed in the later part of the century.
In 1864 William Leighton of J. H. Hobbs, Brockunier, & Co. in West
Virginia perfected a formula for an inexpensive soda-based glass that
was as crystalline as the heavy lead glass previously used for most
American-made clear glass items. This new glass revolutionized the
pressed glass tableware industry, and probably was responsible for the
flood of clear glass medicinal and household bottles that followed the
Civil War. Like earlier clear glass, the improved lime glass was tinted
with manganese oxide to remove its natural green coloring. Clear glass
items manufactured with manganese tend to turn varying shades of
lavender when left exposed to the sun. Manganese was imported from
Germany in the nineteenth century to decolor glass and was no longer
used after the outbreak of World War I.
In the immediate post-Civil War period, the American glass industry
expanded rapidly. Molds were improved and worker and furnace
productivity increased to many times their 1800 level. New bottle shapes
were introduced, and specialized and embossed bottles proliferated. The
manufacture of preserve jars became a major industry, and a special
“blow-back” mold, included in John Mason’s 1858 fruit jar patent, was
used to form the screw threads for the sealable lids. Standard bottle
shapes for different products became common, as did uniformly applied
standard lip forms for different purposes. The standard shapes of the
bottles from the Middleton Place privy are shown in Figure 16.
Turnmolding, a long-known method of removing mold marks by rotating the
unfinished bottle in the mold, became a popular way of manufacturing
unblemished wine bottles. A popular technique of embossing was
plate-molding, an operation in which a personalized name plate could be
inserted into a standard mold for inexpensive lettering of even small
runs of bottles.
[Illustration: Figure 16. Bottle shapes from the Middleton Place
privy (not to scale). A. Champagne beer. B. Export beer. C. Malt
whiskey. D. Jo-Jo flask. E. Union Oval flask. F. Bordeaux wine. G.
Hock wine. H. Olive oil. I. American preserve. J. Fluted extract. K.
Bromo-Seltzer. L. Poison. M. French square. N. Baltimore oval. O.
Philadelphia oval. P. Double Philadelphia oval. Q. Plain oval. R.
Panel. S. Ball neck panel. T. Oil panel. U. Round prescription. V.
Quinine. W. Morphine. X. Free-blown apothecary’s vial. Y. Round
patch box. Z. Ointment. AA. Stoneware ink. BB. Bell mucilage. CC.
Cone ink. DD. Cylinder ink.]
The first mechanized production of bottles in the United States was on a
semiautomatic “press-and-blow” machine patented by Philip Argobast in
1881 and used by the Enterprise Glass Co. of Pittsburgh to make Vaseline
jars in 1893. Although the molten glass still had to be gathered and
dropped into the mold by hand, the Argobast machine could produce
completely machine-molded wide-mouth jars by pressing the lip and
blowing the body in two separate operations. Semiautomatic production
rapidly took over the fruit jar industry, and by the turn of the century
most fruit jars were made on semiautomatic machines rather than in the
traditional blow-back molds. Narrow-necked bottles, however, could not
be manufactured on “press-and-blow” machines because the plunger for the
pressing operation could not be withdrawn through a narrow opening.
Although a “blow-and-blow” machine for narrow-necked bottles was
developed in England in the late 1880s, semiautomatics for small-mouthed
ware were apparently not introduced in the U.S. until after the
development of the automatic Owens bottle machine in 1903.
The Owens machine, invented by Michael J. Owens of the Toledo Glass Co.,
was put into production in 1904. It differed from the semiautomatics in
that the glass was gathered into the molds by mechanical suction
process, thus completely eliminating hand labor. Despite a series of
improvements from 1904 to 1911, the Owens machine was slow to gain
acceptance, both because of its expense and because of the restrictive
licensing policies adopted by the Toledo Glass Co. In 1905 most bottle
production other than wide-necked jars was still by hand. Semiautomatics
came into increasing use, however, and a number of improvements made
them a serious threat to the Owens machine. After about 1914, there was
a proliferation of patents for automatic feeding devices that could
cheaply convert the more modern semiautomatics into fully automatic
machines. Use of feeder-fed semiautomatics, as well as the Owens
automatic machines, reduced hand bottle production to 50% of the
country’s output by 1917, and to less than 10% by 1925. More efficient
feeder machines slowly replaced the Owens-type suction machines and are
the type in general use today.