Glass Bottle Manufacturing: Glassblowers to ABB

Glass bottle manufacturing is some of the hottest work in industry. The furnace runs day and night, gobs of molten glass at well over 1,000 °C drop into moulds, and finished bottles leave the forming machine still glowing. This post traces how bottles were made by teams of glassblowers and boys, how Michael Owens and later the IS machine took over the blowing, and how robots now swab moulds and handle the ware. It covers this year's furnace closures in Germany, a record electric furnace planned for Costa Rica, the ABB robots that pack bottles at Gerresheimer in Essen, and what could come next.

Visitors watch freshly formed bottles move along the forming line at Encirc's glass plant near Runcorn, England, 2024. Photo: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street via Wikimedia Commons (OGL 3)

From glassblowing shops to the Owens machine

Before machines, every bottle passed through a team of people. A skilled blower gathered molten glass on a pipe and blew it into a mould, others finished the neck, and boys carried the hot bottles to the annealing oven, called the lehr. In 1908 and 1909 the photographer Lewis Hine documented this work for the National Child Labor Committee, at plants such as the Cumberland Glass Works in Bridgeton, New Jersey. Many of his pictures were taken on night shifts. One, from Indiana in August 1908, is captioned "A typical glass works boy, night shift. Said he was 16 years old. 1 A.M."

Night shift at the Cumberland Glass Works in Bridgeton, New Jersey, 1909. Photo: Lewis Hine / National Archives via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Michael J. Owens changed the trade. Working in Toledo, Ohio, for Edward Drummond Libbey, he built the first commercially successful, fully automatic bottle-making machine in 1903, with engineers William Boch, C. William Schwenzfeier and Richard LaFrance. The first commercial model, the A, appeared in 1905, and the refined AR followed in 1912, averaging 50,400 bottles a day. The business became the Owens Bottle Company in 1919 and, after a 1929 merger with the Illinois Glass Company, Owens-Illinois. In 1983 the American Society of Mechanical Engineers named the Owens AR machine an International Historic Engineering Landmark.

A ten-arm Owens automatic bottle machine, around 1913. Photo: Lewis Hine via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The machine most bottle plants run today came next. In 1925 Henry W. Ingle at the Hartford-Empire Company built the first individual section, or IS, machine. It has a row of 5 to 20 identical sections, each with its own full set of mechanisms. A gob of glass at about 1,050 to 1,200 °C falls into a blank mould, is pressed or blown into a rough shape called a parison, then is flipped into the final mould and blown out. One manual job stayed with the operators: swabbing. Every 10 to 20 minutes someone reached into the running machine with a swab of lubricant so the glass would not stick to the blank moulds.

A machine operator works in more than 100 °C of heat at the VEB Glaswerk in Stralau, Berlin, 1973. Photo: Peter Koard / Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-M0706-0020 (CC BY-SA 3.0 de)

Glass bottle manufacturing in 2026

In Europe the industry is under pressure. On 24 September 2026 Packaging Insights reported that BV Glas, the German glass industry association, is seeing weaker demand and changing consumer habits, and that Ardagh, BA Glass and Verallia have closed German production sites. The German container glass market grew 2.2 percent in 2025 to about 3.87 million tonnes after falling in 2023 and 2024, and BV Glas warns that a furnace, once shut, cannot be restarted quickly. Other producers are still investing. On 30 September Glass International reported that Vical has hired Fives to build the world's largest all-electric glass furnace, 200 tonnes a day, at its Vicesa plant in Costa Rica.

The Wiegand-Glas container glass plant in Steinbach am Wald, Germany, from the air. Photo: Wiegand-Glas / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Swabbing is where robots have reached the hot end. Heye International fitted a swabbing robot to a 10-section triple gob IS machine at Thai Glass Industries, the first installation of its kind in Thailand, and reports zero rejects from swabbing, fewer section stops and less lubricant used. Bucher Emhart Glass, which still builds IS machines, offers its FlexRobot to swab blank moulds and neck rings. XPAR Vision developed its BlankRobot after four years of work with the French swabbing robot maker Novaxion. With a special lubricant applied precisely, it cuts swabbing from every 10 to 20 minutes to once every three hours, leaving the robot time for other jobs.

A two-part bottle mould with a glass bottle inside at the National Bottle Museum in Ballston Spa, New York. Photo: Jim Griffin / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

ABB robots work further down the line, at the cold end. Gerresheimer's glassworks in Essen, founded in 1723, melts glass 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and makes hundreds of thousands of clear and brown bottles and jars daily. ABB robots place up to several hundred bottles a minute from the cooling conveyors onto carriers, other ABB robots pack them into trays after inspection, and an IRB 6700 palletizes them. The smaller arms run in MultiMove cells, where one controller drives up to four robots. ABB reported in 2024 that it had replaced seven of these robot systems with new ones, which keeps spare parts available for the next decade.

ABB robots handling glass bottles at Gerresheimer in Essen. Photo: ABB

Where robots in glass plants go next

The next step is general-purpose industrial robots at the hot end. ABB sells Foundry Plus versions of its arms that are protected against heat, dust and water for die casting and forging cells. An arm like that could swab moulds, take sample bottles off the conveyor for lab checks or help change parts on the IS machine. ABB has not announced a swabbing product, so this is a possibility. Any such cell would be planned and checked in RobotStudio first, because each IS section opens and closes several times a minute and the robot has to reach in between those movements.

A white ABB foundry robot works in steam at a Bühler die casting cell. Photo: ABB

For households, the change shows up on the shelf and in the recycling bin. Heye says its swabbing robot spreads lubricant evenly and stably, and steady forming means fewer bottles thrown away as rejects. Electric furnaces like the one planned in Costa Rica, where Vical says 99 percent of electricity comes from renewable sources, cut the carbon behind each jar of sauce or bottle of beer. Flat glass for windows is made in a different process, which our window fabrication post covers. In bottle plants, robots are likely to spread from the cold end to the hot end over the next few years.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizer, the kind of robot that stacks packed goods at the end of a line. Photo: ABB

Cost is the first problem. Swabbing robots and new cold end cells have to pay for themselves at a time when German plants are shutting furnaces. The hot end is hot, dusty and full of fast machinery, so every robot cell there needs protected hardware and solid guarding. Skills are the other problem. Operators who used to swab by hand now set up and watch robots, and Heye trained the Thai Glass Industries crew on site in a dedicated IS training section. Gerresheimer's retrofit shows that keeping older robot cells running and supplied with parts is part of the work as well.

Staff and visitors walk past Line 4 at Encirc's glass plant near Runcorn, England, 2024. Photo: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street via Wikimedia Commons (OGL 3)

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