Excerpt from The Glass House Boys of Pittsburgh In 1913, Michael J. Owens, a principal figure in the American glass industry, received an unsolicited letter from a "special agent" of the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC). The contents were startling. The NCLC had, since its founding nearly ten years earlier, devoted itself almost exclusively to ending industrial child labor in America and had achieved remarkable success in that arena. Further, the NCLC had focused special attention on the nation's glass-bottle industry, which, with its longstanding practice of employing thousands of children--the so-called glass house boys--had one of the most egregious records of child employment in the country. Yet, notwithstanding these efforts, this letter thanked Owens for accomplishing what the NCLC admitted it had been unable to do: virtually ending the use of child labor in the nation's glassbottle factories, especially the practice of night labor, for which the glass houses were infamous and which the committee considered particularly odious.1 The letter Owens received is especially remarkable because he was no progressive reformer. He was the son of a West Virginia coal miner and was himself a former union glass worker who had become one of the leading industrial glass men in the country.

What Owens did to generate the letter and earn the praise and respect of the NCLC was to invent, patent, and market the world's first fully automated glass-bottle blowing machine, what came to be known as the "Owens Automatic." Until that time, because of the intricacies of the production process, glass bottles were almost universally made by hand. The Owens Automatic marked the end of a method of glass production that had held sway for thousands of years and had shaped nearly every aspect of the American glass bottle industry.