History of Glass Production in Wellsboro PA

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The Window Glass and Cut Glass Factories

The story of glass in Wellsboro starts a full thirty years before the arrival of the Corning Glass Works bulb plant. In 1886, a group of forty-five residents founded the Wellsboro Glass Company to make window glass using a 10-pot furnace. The glass was gathered and blown by hand by swinging the glass in a deep pit forming large cylinders about six feet long and a foot in diameter. After blowing, it was cut and flattened in an oven before being cut to size. The glass manufacturers of Wellsboro were a persistent bunch. The first factory burned down two years after opening and was back up and running three months later. Over the next eighteen years, the factory burned down again and went through four changes in name and ownership: United Glass Company, Wellsboro Co-operative Glass Works, Wellsboro Glass Company (again), and the Columbia Glass Company. They modernized it with a tank furnace but it was eventually shut down for good in 1907 as window glass blowing machinery in other plants was making enormous 25 to 35 foot long cylinders.

Beginning in the late 1890s, cut glassware went from being found only in homes of the wealthy to being generally affordable. Cut glass was made by first marking a glass blank with a design followed by a rough cut with a belt-driven steel wheel along with sand and water. The smoothing step was done with the well beveled edge of a stone wheel followed by polishing and an acid bath. Cut glass shops began popping up wherever there was a glass factory nearby to supply the blanks of glass for cutting. J. Hoare & Company of Corning set up a branch plant across the railroad tracks from the window glass plant in Wellsboro in 1906. The plant employed as many as sixty-two men and was in business until 1914 when the grandson of J. Hoare, John S. Hoare, opened Hoare and Millspaugh which continued on the same site until 1917.

Thomas Edison (reprinted by the Norris Peters Co.), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

History of Glass

The light bulb

In December 1879 at Menlo Park in New Jersey, Thomas Edison introduced the world to his new incandescent lamp by opening his laboratory and grounds to the public. It was a magical sight for visitors to see light that did not flicker like gas or be blindingly bright like arc lamps. To make his new long-lived lamp, Edison needed two things: a carbon filament and a glass envelope. Glass was used for several reasons. The most obvious was to allow the light from the filament to escape but it also had to withstand intense heat, protect the filament, and provide a vacuum without which the filament didn’t last. The first bulbs were made from glass tubing heated with an air and gas burner at a glassblower’s table and a sphere was blown on the end of the tube. The vacuum pumps were also made entirely of glass and the first lamp factory started at Menlo Park was filled with glassblowers making vacuum pumps and bulbs.

But there was a problem: the cost of making bulbs from tubing was much too high. The solution was to buy the blown bulbs directly from a glass manufacturer. For that, they turned to the expertise of the Corning Glass Works and began buying bulbs around the time of the startup of the lamp factory in the fall of 1880. The Corning Glass Works remained Edison’s only supplier for the next decade. The glassblowers worked in teams, known as “shops,” led by the glassblower, or gaffer. A gatherer collected the glass by rotating a metal blowpipe in a pot of glass and then prepared the glass for blowing by marvering, or shaping, it on a flat surface. The glassblowers developed a technique of blowing the bulbs that was done without tools by blowing the shape and then letting the bulb hang off the pipe to form the neck. Boys then took the bulbs off the pipes and loaded them in trays. A shop made around two bulbs a minute. In the early 1890s, molds were introduced for blowing and a mold boy was added.

RISE OF THE MACHINES

Little changed in bulb blowing for the next twenty years until work began in Toledo and Corning on bulb making machinery. In Toledo, the fully automatic Westlake machine was developed by August Kadow using the platform of the Owens Bottle Machine and put into production at the Libbey Glass Company in early 1913. Meanwhile in Corning, Amory Houghton, Jr., the head of the Corning Glass Works, questioned the use of machines for blowing glass but his two sons saw the coming threat of machines to their booming bulb business. Months after work on the Westlake machine began, the Houghton brothers began funding work which led to the founding of the Empire Machine Company and the invention of the semi-automatic E machine. The effort was led by Benjamin Chamberlin, a machinist, with input from Will Woods, a bulb blower who learned his trade at Westinghouse in Pittsburgh and had quickly risen to be a foreman at Corning. The first E machines went into production at General Electric’s Central Falls, Rhode Island glass plant in 1914 and at Corning a year later.

Photo of “Billy Woods in the CGW hand bulb shop – 1899” from History of Wellsboro Pennsylvania Plant published by Corning Incorporated, 1966

The Bulb Factory

In 1916, the Corning Glass Works management wanted to try out a new glassmaking process. They had always made bulbs from pot furnaces and wanted to build a tank furnace. The only problem was that their factory, bounded by the railroad tracks and business district on one side and the river on the other, had no room to expand. They learned of the old window glass factory in Wellsboro whose businessmen quickly made a trip to Corning to offer their help and incentives to set up the factory. It took half a year to refurbish the plant and build the tank, the largest ever made for hand gathering glass. The factory opened late in the year with a tube shop and twenty E machines with each machine having a dedicated “boot,” or opening, to gather from the tank. The plant superintendent was Will Woods.

Since there was no glassblowing required, Woods recruited men from the neighboring area off farms and out of other industries to gather glass and operate the machines. An E machine had one gatherer who fed the machine and two unskilled helpers to unload the bulbs and prepare the blowpipes. The machine formed the glass and blew the bulb in a mold automatically. With this small crew, a shop typically made around 7 bulbs/minute. The fastest shops made as many as 10 or 11 bulbs/minute.

The tube shop was the one part of the plant requiring a skilled glassblower. Tubing was used to hold the filament stem in the bulb and as a temporary attachment to the top of the bulb for the vacuum pump. The removal of the top tube after evacuating the air left the pointed tip on bulbs made before the early 1920s. Tubing was made by gathering a large amount of glass on a blowpipe, forming a bubble, attaching a punty rod (metal pipe) to the bottom of the bubble, and then having the worker holding the punty walk away from the blower while maintaining the bubble in the glass. The tubing rested on pieces of wood laid out on the floor like the ties of a railroad track. Factories with tube making had a long building known as a “tube alley” attached to them with Wellsboro’s being 250 feet long!

The timing of the factory could not have been better as the demand for electric light surged. As the first company plant outside of Corning, its success was no guarantee and owed a lot to the character of the local workforce. According to Dr. Eugene C. Sullivan, former Corning president and honorary chairman of the board, “…the helpfulness and general character of the people of Wellsboro and vicinity soon convinced us that our choice of this good borough was no mistake. The production of these ‘boys’ who had no experience with glass was always better than that of experienced glass workers… This was mostly because they had no preconceived notions on why something could not be done. For years, the Wellsboro employees, with their semi-automatic ‘E’ machines, competed successfully in bulb costs with the fully automatic Westlake machine.” It took a lot of them to do that with employment peaking around 650 in 1920 after the plant added a second tank. They were not all men either. Since the opening of the plant, the inspection department was entirely women other than the foreman and the shipping department also employed many women packing bulbs.

Photo from Life in Wellsboro 1880-1920 by Gale Largey

the ingenious Will woods

Will Woods returned to Corning before the plant expansion was finished. His success at Wellsboro was rewarded with a new position as the superintendent of the Corning Glass Works sprawling main plant. His new job didn’t keep him from thinking about bulb blowing machines. The company had recently installed an automatic tube drawing machine to replace the hand process used in both Corning and Wellsboro. The machine fed a ribbon of glass onto a rotating mandrel with air blown through the center and tubing was drawn off the end in a continuous process. In 1921, Woods formed an idea of how to use that ribbon of glass in a completely different way. According to his co-inventor, David Gray, Woods tested the idea by gathering some glass, flattening it, and laying it onto a metal plate with a hole in it. After letting it sag through the hole, he put the tip of a blowpipe that fit into the hole onto the glass and blew into it. He imagined a continuous chain of plates with a ribbon of glass on it along with blow heads on top and molds underneath. This idea would become the ribbon machine.

Gray was the engineer in charge of the Mechanical Development Department and worked with Woods to take his idea and turn it into a machine. Designing, assembling, and testing the 20,000 special parts for the machine took years and in 1924 they began assembling what was then known only as the “399 Machine.” They worked in secret in a corner of the factory that was strictly off-limits to anyone not on the project. By the following fall, they knew they had a machine that worked and had the perfect place to put it to use: the Wellsboro plant.

Back To Wellsboro

In March 1925, the residents of Wellsboro were shocked to see a front page headline in The Wellsboro Agitator that read “Glass Works Will Shut Down.” A month later, it was true. Some employees were transferred to Corning while most of the nearly 400 employees were not given any other options. The reason for the closure was automatic bulb making machines. The E machine had been followed by a fully automatic F machine which was fed gobs of glass directly from a furnace and turned out 42 bulbs/minute. There were several of these in operation at the Corning plant. But it was worse than that. The previous year, the Corning Glass Works had purchased General Electric’s Central Falls plant running Westlake machines. Each machine turned out 50,000 bulbs every 24 hours (35 each minute) with one operator. The E machines could not keep up.

The Corning Glass Works officials had estimated it would be two to three years before they reopened the Wellsboro plant, but it was only a year later that they announced the reopening of the plant for experimental work with what was described as “a large automatic bulb blowing machine.” By the fall of 1926, the plant was in full production again with the ribbon machine. The leap in output was astounding. The machine was already making 150 bulbs/minute. Within a few years, there were four ribbon machines running at the plant with output doubled to 300 bulbs/minute, producing a river of bulbs flowing

Each Ribbon Machine is over 50 feet long, 18 feet tall, and weighs 22 tons!

Ribbon machines on trailers – photo by Carrie Heath

around the world

Wellsboro was not just where the ribbon machine was invented. It is also where ribbon machines were manufactured in order to be shipped to other places for production. Other Corning plants that had ribbon machines were located in Kentucky and Rhode Island. Machines were also built here and sent to countries like Hungary, Japan, Iraq, China, and even Russia. To make sure that history would always remember where they were made, though, the Wellsboro employees did things like fold up an American flag and place it inside a support column before sending a machine across the sea.

These machines were remarkably efficient. In the 1970s, just 15 ribbon machines across the globe produced enough to supply the entire world with light bulbs and ornaments.

There were two types of ribbon machines in use at the Wellsboro plant. The Model 100 was 25 feet long and produced on average 300 bulbs per minute. The Model 400 was 50 feet long and produced on average 1,100 bulbs per minute. The highest capacity that a ribbon machine could run at was 3 million of the smaller sized bulbs in 24 hours.

the town that saved Christmas

Starting in the 1880s, F.W. Woolworth imported glass ornaments from Lauscha, Germany to stock in his stores throughout the northeast. By the 1930s, 95% of the ornaments on American trees came from Germany. By 1937 the actions of an increasingly aggressive Nazi Germany threatened to disrupt the supply of imports.

Fearing the loss of the income from these extremely popular Christmas decorations, Woolworth suppliers Max Eckardt and Bill Thompson visited Corning Glass Works in Wellsboro to see if they were willing and able to modify the ribbon machine to create glass Christmas balls. Edward Leibig, Wellsboro’s CGW plant manager accepted the challenge. Wellsboro’s employees created and installed new molds and in 1939, the first million glass ornaments rolled off the line.

These ornaments were originally only clear glass. They were shipped to Eckardt’s plant in New Jersey where they were painted in plain red, green, silver, gold, and blue and sold under the name “Shiny Brite.”

Christmas ornament suppliers including George Franke, Rauch, Krebs Brothers and others were soon contracting with CGW as well.

In 1940, Corning Glass Works purchased silvering and lacquering (S + L) machines, which allowed an operator to set up a rack of bulbs and spray a shiny silver nitrate solution inside each blank. The rack was then tipped to drain the blanks, and their exterior was coated with a transparent colored lacquer.

With this addition, the Wellsboro facility was able to make finished glass ornaments, and produced 40 million that year.

starting new traditions

With WWII came increased patriotism, and Americans were eager to break away from traditional European designs. Two Tioga County “boys” from Holliday, Ellsworth Brown and Carleton Hayes, were given the task of designing new styles of ornaments. Their modern “Industrial Deco” ornaments were notable for their bold forms, clear lines, and strong geometric patterns. A 1941 design notebook shows over a dozen shapes that were produced in Wellsboro including assorted bells, pine cones, oblongs, reflectors, and lanterns. Ornaments made in Wellsboro had metal caps stamped with “Made in U.S.A” on the top.

Imported ornaments, with multi-faceted indentations, were prized for their ability to capture light and multiply radiance. Whether blown by hand or machine, these were some of the most difficult styles to produce, and yet engineers were able to create these beautiful ornaments on CGW’s ribbon machine. At the Wellsboro factory, these ornaments were called “Round Dimple Reflectors” or RDRs.

These pieces, affectionately called “fancies,” were popular in the early 1940s, and required a new process to form and release the intricate asymmetrical glass shapes without breakage. This same process was later used to produce fancy flame-shaped lightbulbs.

Photo of an RDR “fancy” ornament by Anja Stam

World War II Brings Changes

With the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States joined World War II, and many Corning Glass Works men were called off to war. 296 Wellsboro CGW employees served in WWII. Corning promised they would be able to return to their jobs when they came home, but in the meantime there were several hundred vacant positions at the factory.

Wellsboro’s women had always held some roles at the factory, but now they really rose to the occasion. Women held a variety of jobs including inspecting product as it came down the line, setting up the racks for the silvering and lacquering machine, hand painting ornaments, and sorting and packing the finished product. CGW liked having women on the line because of their nimble fingers. For some women this was a breakout period, a chance to do work outside the home. They enjoyed their work at the factory and some stayed on after the war.

World War II did not just affect the staffing at the factory, it also affected the products. At first, patriotic colors became even more popular. Use of metals started to be rationed, which meant no silver lacquer inside the ornaments starting in 1943. Ornaments were still coated with colored lacquers on the outside, and some had “sprigs” of metal tinsel placed inside to provide some light reflection. By 1944 almost all metal was going toward the war effort, so in addition to not having silver lacquer or tinsel inside the ornaments, the metal caps were also replaced by cardboard or paper hangers. Rationing continued after the war, and the metal caps did not return until 1946 with a new, fluted design.

Photos of WWII era ornaments from “SHINY-BRITE: America’s Most Nostalgic Christmas Ornaments” by C. Runge Jr., originally published in the December 2013 Busy Bee Trader.

Photo of two Permacap ornaments by Carrie Heath

new styles of ornaments

In 1959, machines for automatically decorating Christmas bulbs were installed at the Wellsboro plant. 100 million ornaments were produced in that year.

Christmas decorating styles evolved over the years, which is reflected in the shapes and colors that were popular during different decades. One constant throughout the years, though, was the frustration of losing the hangers for ornaments. Wellsboro employees had a solution for that. In the early 1960s CGW purchased two machines designed by Ellsworth Brown to fabricate PermaCap ornaments. These ornaments had a wire hanger fused directly into the glass bulb, and were decorated with a glass frit “snow” cap. Though this eliminated the frustration of lost caps, the practical design was not popular, and the machines were scrapped before mass production got underway.

1970's shrink wrap

Hand decorating Christmas ornaments gave way to another innovation in 1973 when Don Wilcox of Wellsboro’s Corning Glass Works developed a new process allowing full color photographs to be printed on a film. This film could then be slipped over a glass bulb and fitted tightly with a blast of hot air.

A shrink-wrap department was set up at the Wellsboro plant, and soon it was producing ornaments under the Corning label. The first glass ornaments of this type featured a reproduction of a Currier and Ives’ “Skating in Central Park” winter scene. A great variety of additional styles were introduced over the following years including a wide range of Hallmark collectibles. The new shrink-wrap technology allowed Hallmark to introduce their line of Keepsake Ornaments in 1973 with iconic American images such as Betsey Clark, Norman Rockwell, Peanuts, and Mickey Mouse. These were also manufactured, decorated, packaged and shipped from the Wellsboro plant.

Photo of Currier and Ives ornament by Anja Stam

light bulbs, vacuum tubes & more

In addition to the ornaments that Wellsboro has become known for, Corning Glass Works’ Wellsboro factory continued producing light bulb blanks during these decades as well. Light bulb blanks were sent to Sylvania, GE, Westinghouse, and Phillips. Bulbs were produced in different colors by blending other materials such as cobalt into the mix. Another ribbon machine was added to the factory which allowed for variations in color, size, and shape of the bulbs being produced. Smaller automobile light bulbs were produced in Wellsboro and sent to Ford, GM, and Chrysler.

Another product produced in mass quantities at the Wellsboro factory were radio and vacuum tubes. These were sent to RCA, Westinghouse, GE, Motorola, and Emerson to be included in radios and TVs. It is extraordinary to think that by the 1960s, nearly every household in the United States would have had some product that rolled off the factory line in Wellsboro, whether it was a Christmas ornament, a light bulb, the tubes in the radio or tv, or the lightbulbs in the car.

Photo of radio clock at the Penn Wells Hotel by Clare Ritter

the people

The Corning Glass Works factory in Wellsboro employed about 1,800-2,000 workers in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It was not uncommon for CGW to employ workers from the same family. “If you came from a family with a good work history at Corning, they were willing to hire you on the spot,” recalled former employee, Don Wilcox.

Corning Glass Works’ factory had a huge impact on the town of Wellsboro. Many employees worked at the facility for decades. Service dinners were held at the Wellsboro-Charleston Senior High School. 50-year employees were given a diamond pin and a check for $1,000 in 1966. Employees enjoyed these service dinners as well as less formal get-togethers like summer picnics.

Wellsboro has celebrated the Laurel Festival every June since 1938. Part of this annual event is the Laurel Festival Parade. Corning Glass Works’ float entries into the Laurel Festival Parade were glittering masterpieces made with crushed glass. They eventually took themselves out of competition after winning too many times.

Every July on the second Saturday, the employees from the Wellsboro factory would get together with employees from Corning at Eldridge Park in Elmira, NY. Families would eat and ride the rides to their heart’s content. Afterwards, the factory would shut down for two weeks so that everyone could take a hard-earned vacation.

Even though it was an extremely dangerous plant in many ways, Corning’s records show that the Wellsboro facility won the company-wide safety trophy 10 times, and Wellsboro had the most consecutive accident-free man hours – 3,381,971 to be exact.

honoring WWII factory heroes

In 1945 the armistice was signed and WWII ended. Soon Wellsboro’s husbands, fathers, and sons would begin the long journey home. In 1946, D.J. Carr, plant manager, determined he wanted to welcome them home with a banquet in their honor. He approached Ellsworth “Brownie” Brown with a request that he create a design out of Corning Glass products that could be used as a backdrop to the main banquet table. Brownie realized he had plenty of red, white, blue, and gold Christmas bulbs to work with, and he came up with a flag design that was then used to commemorate the soldiers’ return. This beautiful ornament flag remains on display to this day in the lobby of the Penn Wells Hotel.

honoring the fallen

Eight employees of the Wellsboro facility did not return from the war. A memorial plaque was dedicated in their honor and stood at the entrance of the plant until it closed.

Wellsboro Glass Historical Association