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!