The most significant advance in glass production in over 2,000 years...      -American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 1983 Michael Owens, a self-taught American inventor, propelled the glass industry into the mechanical age. In 1903, he unveiled the world’s first completely automatic glass-forming machine—a machine for making bottles. Owens was determined to eliminate the hand delivery of hot glass to bottle machines. He was convinced that a machine could suck thick, molten glass from a rotating pot directly into its molds.

A little more than 2,000 years ago, a Roman glassworker did something that dramatically changed the course of history. He blew a puff of air through a hollow %%rod%% into a gob of hot glass. The gob inflated into a bubble. At that moment, glassblowing was born.

Why did such an important discovery occur so late in the … history of glass, and why was an accident necessary to bring it about?      – Donald Stookey, 1977 Crystals are usually a glassmaker’s enemy. When they form in glass, crystals can change the properties of the material in unwanted ways. Corning chemist Donald Stookey saw crystals differently. One night in 1954, he put a piece of experimental glass into a furnace. The next morning, he discovered that the furnace had overheated. He was sure he would find a pool of melted glass inside.

In 1879, the brilliant inventor Thomas Edison was on the verge of a breakthrough. He had discovered a slow-burning filament that would glow for hours in the vacuum of a glass globe. But to create the first practical electric light, he needed a glass globe that would not implode when the air

"If necessity is the mother of invention, then for the glass fiber industry, adversity is the father."

Otto Schott, the pioneering German glass chemist, made a glass that could reliably do something that didn’t seem possible: endure sudden, uneven temperature shifts without shattering. The key, Schott discovered in 1882, was to have a critical amount of the element boron in the glass recipe.