Last Saturday marked the seventh anniversary of the death of Michael Joseph Owens, a native of the County of Wexford, and inventor of the machine which revolutionised the method of making bottles - the "Owens Bottle Machine."
Without this invention the whole process of mass production, packing and distribution of liquid and semisolid commodities would have been impossible; for the hand-blown glass container of other days was slow to make and expensive.
Most up-to-date bottle factories are equipped with the Owens bottle machine, and users of bottles who require accuracy of capacity, weight and strength in their containers usually specify Owens bottles, especially if they are to be filled on the automatic filling and capping machines now installed in dairies, distilleries and chemical laboratories.
Born on January 1st, 1859, Michael Joseph Owens emigrated to the United States, where he perfected his invention and created the greatest organisation of its kind in the world - the concern known as the Owens Illinois Glass Company - with 18 factories and world-wide connections.
The Scientific American for November last describes a visit to one of the factories at Alton, Illinois, where there is in operation the world's biggest Owens machine, weighing 120 tons and standing 20 feet high. This machine was engaged on the manufacture of huge glass carboys. The output of the factory was stated as being 300 tons of glass bottles a day, and the range manufactured comprises 3,200 varieties.
The Owens machine sucks up the glass from the melting pots, blows it into the moulds, from which the bottles are then discharged on to a travelling belt and into the tempering machine, where they are tempered and sterilised by electricity, corked or capped whilst still hot, without having once been touched by human hands.
The Irish Times,
December 29th, 1930.