The World in a Grain

by Vince Beiser

  Owens figured he could do better. Automation was replacing human hands everywhere, increasing production at an explosive rate in industries of all kinds. Owens was no engineer and had only a rudimentary grasp of the chemistry of glass.25 But he had worked every stage of the glassmaking process and understood it viscerally.26 With Libbey’s support and the resources of a now-sizable company to draw on, he set to work on making a bottle-making machine.

  It took five years and $500,000—a colossal sum in those days—but in 1903 the first Owens Bottle Machine was ready. It sported six rotating arms, each fitted with a mold and a pipe. Owens’s key breakthrough was figuring out a way for the machine to gather up the molten glass, something that had stumped other would-be bottle automators. He installed a small pump on each arm; pulling the plunger back created a vacuum that sucked the glass up into a mold, then pushing it down sent a burst of air in to blow the glass into the right shape.27 Instant bottle. The machine then cut the bottle loose and put it on a conveyor belt leading to the annealing furnace.

  The very first model cranked out bottles six times faster than a human crew. By the time Owens had an updated model ready to sell to other bottle makers, the machine could produce a dozen bottles per minute. Not only was the process far faster, it required far fewer workers, especially expensive, skilled ones. It cut the cost of producing a gross (or a dozen dozen) of bottles from $1.80 to 12 cents.

  The machine was a smash hit. An industry magazine frothed: “The Owens machine stands alone in a class unapproached by other inventors. It . . . eliminates all skill and labor, and reduces the cost of production practically to the cost of materials used. Not only that, but it puts the same amount of glass into every bottle, makes every bottle of the same exact length, finish, weight, shape and capacity. It wastes no glass, uses no pipes, snaps, finishing tools, glory-holes, gatherer, blower, mold boy, snap boy, or finisher, and still makes better bottles, more of them, at a lower cost, than is possible by any other known process.”28 The invention was such a success that Libbey and Owens cofounded a new enterprise, the Owens Bottle Company, to manufacture bottles and license the technology to other companies. Eighty years later, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers dubbed Owens’s machine an engineering landmark, and declared “Mike Owens’s invention of the automatic bottle-making machine in 1903 was the most significant advance in glass production in over 2,000 years.”

  Suddenly, thanks to Owens’s machine, far more bottles than ever before were being made. That meant more glass was needed. And to make that glass, unprecedented quantities of silica sand were drafted into service. In the single year following the introduction of the bottle-making machine, silica sand production in the United States leapt from 1.1 million tons to 4.4 million tons.29

  Clawing all those grains from the earth wreaked considerable damage on the environment. Starting in 1890, sand miners completely dismantled the Hoosier Slide, a 200-foot-tall Indiana dune near Michigan City that was once a tourist attraction, hauling its grains away in wheelbarrows to sell to glassmakers like the Ball Corporation, makers of the famous Ball mason jar.30 Like Libbey, the Ball brothers had been coaxed into leaving New York for the Midwest by the cheap gas, high-quality sand, and generous financial incentives offered by local governments. They made millions of jars and other containers with Hoosier Slide sand, which gave the glass a blue tint. Those jars are now prized collector’s items. They went out of production after the 1930s because by then the dune was gone. Other dunes along the Lake Michigan shoreline, some as high as 300 feet, were also mined out of existence until public outcry forced the state government to protect them in the 1970s and 1980s.31

  Elsewhere in Indiana, the Gary Evening Post complained in 1913 that “sand sucker” boats were “stealing the bottom” of Lake Michigan to sell to glassmakers.32 At the time, no permit or payment was required; anyone was free to dredge as much sand as they liked. (Indiana sand also provided fill for the site of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and to reclaim the land on which Chicago’s famous Lincoln Park was built.)

  Owens and Libbey assured their own supply of the crucial resource by creating the Toledo-Owens Glass Sand Company and buying up a mine in the aptly named nearby town of Silica, Ohio. A trade magazine declared the sand quarried there to be “pure white in color and of exceptional quality.”33

  Today, bottles seem a mundane, disposable product. But Owens’s machine had consequences so far-reaching it’s hard to fathom. It made many people rich, most of whom had nothing to do with bottle-making. It transformed bottles from a luxury to a commodity, altering forever the patterns of what we drink and how, when, and where we drink it.

  Within just a few years of its introduction, Owens’s machine was making bottles for everyone from milk producers to H. J. Heinz. By 1911, 103 of the machines were at work in the United States and at least nine European countries as well as Japan, cranking out hundreds of millions of bottles annually.

  The first impact of the arrival of all these cheap mass-manufactured bottles was, of course, on the jobs of glassworkers. Recognizing the threat to their jobs, just as bricklayers had earlier with concrete, the bottle blowers’ unions fought to keep Owens’s machine out of their factories. A few of the machines were even sabotaged. But it was a losing battle. By 1917, the number of relatively well-paid skilled glassblowers was cut in half. On the other hand, the market grew so much that the bottle-making industry soon employed more total workers than ever. For the first time, some of those workers were women, who were given jobs sorting and packing the torrent of products flooding out of the factories.

  Owens’s machine quickly and completely wiped out jobs for another class of workers: children. The unions suddenly became crusaders for eliminating child labor—partly because their low pay dragged down wages for everyone, at a time when workingmen’s livelihoods were already in jeopardy. But more important, kids simply were no longer needed in the factories. The dangerous, repetitive tasks that had been given to children were now better handled by machines. In 1880, nearly one-quarter of all glass industry workers were children; by 1919, fewer than 2 percent were.

  Owens was celebrated as a crusading reformer. In 1913 the National Child Labor Committee declared that his machine had done more to eliminate child labor in the United States than the organization had through the legislature. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics declared in 1927 that child labor in the glass industry had become “almost a thing of the past, and credit for this is due in no small measure to Michael J. Owens.” The irony of all this was that Owens himself didn’t see much wrong with child labor. He always insisted his own early career was a fine one for any stouthearted lad. In a 1922 magazine interview, he expounded: “One of the greatest evils of modern life is the growing habit of regarding work as an affliction. When I was a youngster I wanted to work. . . . A great deal of the trouble to day is with the mothers. Too many boys are being brought up by sentimental women. The first fifteen or twenty years of their lives are spent in playing. . . . When they finally start to work, they are so useless and so helpless that it is positively pathetic. The young man who has begun to work when he was a boy has them handicapped. . . . The hard work I did as a boy never injured me.”34 He added: “I went through all the jobs the boys performed, and I enjoyed every bit of the experience.”

  Child labor hasn’t disappeared in all sand-related industries. Today, adolescents toil in sand mines in Morocco, Ghana, Nigeria, India, and Uganda, while miners in Kenya reportedly recruit kids to drop out of school and come to work harvesting sand instead.

  No surprise that the introduction of a bottle-making machine would have a major impact on the lives of those in the bottle-making industry. But the impact of Owens’s machine was far broader reaching. By making it easy and cheap to convert vast quantities of silica sand into huge numbers of glass containers, it turbocharged many other industries, which in turn transformed what and how much Americans eat and drink.

/>   Before 1900, beer and whiskey were distributed in kegs to taverns; if you wanted some to take home, you had to supply your own jug. Milk was stored in metal cans delivered by milk wagons; it was served in pitchers. There was no such thing as a baby bottle.

  Glass is a near-perfect material for packaging food and beverages. It is nonporous and impermeable, and almost nothing reacts with it chemically, which means a bottle will not interact with whatever is inside it. It won’t rust or leach BPAs or impart a plasticky taste; the liquid inside will retain its aroma and flavor for a very long time. So the sudden availability of cheap high-quality bottles was a colossal gift to makers of soft drinks, beer, medicines, and other bottled consumables. It wasn’t only that the bottles were cheap; they could also be made of uniform size, which made it possible to fill them with machines (some of which Owens also helped design), further bringing down the price of the final product. Ketchup, peanut butter, and all kinds of other foods packaged in glass jars became affordable staples.

  Once again, the use of sand in one form led to more of its use in another. Owens’s mass-manufactured bottles hit the market at the same time that automobiles were taking over the country and paved roads were spreading. Both developments made it easier than ever to distribute products like bottled drinks far and wide. Trucks loaded with products packaged in sand rolled smoothly from shop to shop on roads made of sand.

  The result was an enormous surge in the market for bottled drinks. Sales of a new beverage called Coca-Cola, for instance, went from 300 million in 1903—before Owens’s machine hit the market—to 2 billion in 1910. The Coca-Cola Company’s official website credits that in part to “major progress in bottling technology, which improved efficiency and product quality.”35

  The beer business also evolved. In the early 1900s, taking home beer generally involved a trip to the local tavern equipped with a jug, bucket, or whatever container was handy. The lack of fancy packaging gave beer a bit of a low-class reputation—it wasn’t something the well-brought-up would drink at the dinner table. In the 1930s, brewers began a concerted effort to upscale their products’ image by selling it in bottles. The key, of course, was hooking the housewife. “She must be educated to a more easy use of the word, beer, just as she has been educated to the easy use of the word, cigarette,” suggested an article from a trade publication in the mid-1930s. “The beer bottle and label are equally important. If the bottle is clear and clean and the label attractive, the housewife will enjoy placing the bottles upon a tray for serving in the home.”36

  Owens’s and Libbey’s operations came to dominate the manufacture of all types of glass for decades. They followed up the bottle machine with another major project: a machine to automate the making of flat glass, which up to that time had been made by hand. By 1916 they had a good enough model to launch a new company selling sheet glass. Its impact was as profound as the bottle machine, turning windows for houses and cars, as well as glass tableware, from luxury items into everyday basics.

  Glass came into even wider use after 1952 when Alastair Pilkington, a British engineer and businessman, developed a technique of pouring molten glass onto a shallow pool of molten tin, resulting in sheets that could be larger and more uniform in size than ever, ideal for big windows in large-scale construction projects. Float plants using this method soon became the industry standard.

  Architects quickly began using the newly abundant glass in buildings. Glass-skinned skyscrapers took over city skylines. Plate glass production worldwide mushroomed twenty-five-fold between 1980 and 2010.37 Today, more than 11 billion square yards of flat glass are consumed every year38—more than enough to glaze over the entire city of Houston six times.

  The technology of making glass has continued to race forward, and glass is used to do more and more astounding things. Modern life wouldn’t be recognizable without some of the advanced applications to which glass has been turned. Owens-Illinois employees in the 1930s developed a threadlike form of glass that is flexible, strong, lightweight, waterproof, and heat resistant, which they dubbed Fiberglas. (Yes, with one s. Later, other companies brought their own versions to market and the stuff became known generically as fiberglass.) Others had spun glass into threads before, but the new process allowed for the creation of strands as thin as four microns around and thousands of feet long. As is true of all glass products, it owes its existence to sand. To make fiberglass, silica is melted down along with other substances—boron, calcium oxide, magnesia—to make it more workable and give it other properties desired for specific products, such as greater tensile strength. This molten glass is extruded through a metal sleeve set with tiny holes, and the streams are caught on high-speed winders that spin them into filaments. Once cooled and coated with chemical resin, these strands can be used in all kinds of ways.

  Fiberglass-reinforced plastic, tremendously strong but lighter, more malleable, and more weather-resistant than steel, allowed designers to create fanciful new shapes for boats and automobiles. Chevrolet used it in 1953 to produce a sleek, curvaceous sports car called the Corvette. Today it is used for everything from pipe insulation to kayaks. Highly efficient insulation made with fiberglass also helped make possible the movement of millions of people into America’s South and Southwest, areas too unpleasantly hot in summer for most folks to consider without a reliable way to keep the heat out. Sand in the form of fiberglass made it easier for people to move to the sand-strewn deserts of Arizona and Nevada.

  In 1940 the Owens-Libbey corporate family introduced another major innovation in insulation: double-paned glass called Thermopane. Suburban homes everywhere were soon (and still are) outfitted with huge picture windows and sliding glass doors made of this material.

  Owens-Illinois has redoubtable competition in the historic invention department. The name Corning calls to mind ceramic baking dishes. (Ceramics, incidentally, are also largely composed of sand; ground silica provides the skeleton to which the clay and other additives are attached.) Less well known is that Corning is a venerable, pioneering company that not only makes CorningWare and the ubiquitous line of Pyrex bakeware and storage containers, but also some of the most revolutionary glass products in history. Corning was first to market with mass-manufactured lightbulbs and TV picture tubes. Corning also made the heat-resistant windows on NASA spacecraft from the moon rockets to the space shuttle. In 1970, Corning scientists, using high-purity silica, developed the first optical fibers, a breakthrough material capable of carrying enormous amounts of data; much of the Internet’s traffic is now carried along fiber-optic cables.

  Chances are excellent there’s a Corning product in your pocket right now. It’s the company’s famous Gorilla Glass that makes the screens of iPhones and other smartphones so strong and scratch-resistant. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, sand isn’t only all around us. It’s with us, in our pockets and purses, a key component of the mobile phones that are the symbol and pillar of the digital age.

  Even more advanced types of glass are coming. Corning is working on a bendable version of Gorilla Glass, which could be used to make computer tablets that could be folded or rolled up. NSG Group, a Japanese conglomerate, sells self-cleaning glass—windows coated with microscopic amounts of titanium dioxide that react with sunlight to break down dirt. Scientists at England’s University of Southampton are working on using nanostructure inside tiny glass disks to store stupefying amounts of digital information—music, movies, whatever—in a far more stable form than even the best hard drives available today.

  By now glass is a taken-for-granted amenity in houses and businesses around the world. Most of us spend most of our time indoors these days, but thanks to glass, our offices, factories, and homes have far more natural light, more stable temperatures, and way better views than those of our grandparents.

  Glass also offers little life assists in the form of thousands of specialty products, including all those accoutrements of modern middle-class life
we barely notice any more—shower doors, picture frames, salt shakers, patio tabletops, mirrors, and on and on.

  Michael Owens, the man who did more than anyone to make glass a part of our daily lives, died a rich man, with forty-nine patents to his name, on his way out of a company board meeting in 1923. The Owens Bottle Company, now known as Owens-Illinois, Inc., headquartered at One Michael Owens Way in Perrysburg, Ohio, just south of Toledo, is still the world’s leading maker of bottles for alcoholic beverages. It boasts eighty plants in twenty-three countries and more than $6 billion in annual sales.39

  But glass has long since lost its premier position as the world’s beverage container material of choice; plastic bottles and metal cans now make up 80 percent of the market. Glass manufacturing, meanwhile, has largely shifted overseas, leaving Toledo to decline like so many other midwestern industrial towns. There is one silver lining for Toledo residents, though: fewer glass plants mean less air pollution. The blazing furnaces required to melt sand into glass emit substantial amounts of carbon dioxide. They also spew out other compounds, like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides that aren’t greenhouse gases, but can form smog, as well as particulates that can damage human lungs. The glass that comes out of the factories may be clear, but the air around them sure isn’t.

  The industry’s center of gravity today is China, which is now both the world’s largest producer and consumer of glass, churning out and gobbling up more than half of all the world’s flat glass. It so thoroughly dominates glass manufacture today that even the elaborate panels making up the walls of the Glass Pavilion in the Toledo Museum of Art were imported from China in 2006. Back when the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center were built in the 1970s, American glass was used for every inch. Today the lower floors of its replacement, One World Trade Center, are swathed in Chinese glass.

  The booming cities of the developing world don’t need sand only for concrete; they need it for glass. All those new buildings need windows. The new cars on the new highways need windshields. The new middle classes need tableware, bottles, and cell phone screens. Demand for glass is surging. In 2003, China consumed $1.9 billion worth of flat glass, according to Freedonia40; ten years later, the number was nearly $22 billion. The silica sand that makes it has itself become a multibillion-dollar business.