Owens’s invention does more to eliminate child labour than previous legislative efforts.
Michael Owens’s automatic glass bottle-making machine not only revolutionized the glass industry by speeding up the process of bottle-making and reducing its cost, but it also helped the growth of several related sectors and eradicated child labour in the industry. At the same time, glassblowing was one of the most highly paid crafts, and children were often employed as cheap labour. In fact, Owens – who never received any formal education – started working at a West Virginia glass factory at the age of ten to support his family. He subsequently moved to Toledo, Ohio, to work for entrepreneur Edward Libbey, who gave him the opportunity to realize his invention potential.
Building on existing concepts of similar semiautomatic machines, 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 mould. The resulting neck of the bottle was put in a body mould and 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 to give pumps on a circular rotating frame and could produce about 17,000 bottles a day. At a time when glass was still a luxury item, Owens made it possible to produce bottles of identical sizes. With Libbey’s help, he founded his own bottle-making company, which still exists today. Modern machines are able to produce one million bottles a day.