At Wholesale Glass Vases, not only we do our best to supply high quality products, but also want to share some information with you.

  History and origin of glass bottles:

 Glass bottles are not as new as some people might think. In fact, the glass bottle has been around for about 3000 years. In the late first century BC, the Romans began to make glass bottles for use as small pharmacy vials that the local doctors and pharmacists used to dispense pills, healing powders, and miscellaneous potions. These were small cylindrical bottles of three to four inches in length and very narrow.

 As we will read later, the majority of early bottles, after the Romans, were sealed with a cork or glass stopper, whereas the Romans used a small stone rolled in tar as their stopper. Also, the finished bottles contained many impurities such as sand particles and bubbles due to the crude glass producing process. Because of the thickness of the glass and the crude finish, the Roman glass was very resilient compared to the glass of later times, which accounts for the survival and good preservation of some Roman bottles, which have been dated at 2500 years old. During the second century BC, with metal blowpipes and tongs used to change the shape of the bottle or vessel, glass was now being free blown and shaped by molds and decorated with enameling and engraving. In addition to the recognition the Romans receive for developing everything from drama to democratic government, they also get credit for originating what we think of today as the basic “ store bottle” and early merchandising techniques.

 The first effort to manufacture glass in America is thought to have taken place at the Jamestown settlement in Virginia around 1608. It is interesting to note that the majority of glass produced at the Jamestown settlement was in fact earmarked for shipment back to England (due to lack of resource) and not for the new settlements. As it turned out, the Jamestown glass house enterprise ended up a failure almost before it got started. The poor quality of glass produced and the small quantity simply couldn’t support the needs of England.

 The first successful American glass house was started in 1739 in New Jersey by Caspar Wistar, a button manufacturer who immigrated to the United States from Germany. The next major glasshouse operation was started by Henry Stiegel in the Manheim, Pennsylvania, area, between 1763-1774 and eventually went on to establish several more. The Pitkin glassworks was started in East Hartford, Connecticut, around 1783 and was the first American glasshouse to provide figured flasks and also the most successful of its time until it closed around 1830 due to the high cost of wood for fuel. To understand the early glasshouse history, both the successes and far more numerous failures, we need to understand the problems with the availability of raw materials and the concerns of constructing the glasshouse itself.

 The glass factory of the 19th century was usually built near abundant sources of sand and wood or coal close by numerous roads, rivers, and other waterways for transportation of raw materials and finished products to the major eastern markets of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Finding a suitable location was usually not a problem, but once production was underway, resources quickly diminished. The next major problem was the glass house building that was usually a large wooden structure that housed a primitive furnace and was shaped like a beehive about 9FT in diameter.

 A major financial drain on glass companies, and one of the causes of so many of the business going broke, were the large melting pots which fit inside the furnace to hold the molten glass. The melting pot, which cost about $100 and took eight months to build, was formed by hand from a long coil of clay and was the only substance known which would not melt when the glass was heated to 2700 degrees Fahrenheit.  The expected life of each pot was only about eight weeks, as exposure to high temperature over a long period of time caused the clay itself to turn into glass. The cost of regularly replacing melting pots proved to be the downfall of many an early glass factory.

 Throughout the 19th century, glasshouses continued to come and go due to changes in demand and technological improvements. Between 1840-1890, there was enormous demand for glass containers to satisfy the Whiskey and Beer business, medicine, and food-packing industries. Largely due to this steady demand, glass manufacturing in the United States finally expanded into a stable industry. This demand was due in large part to the setting of the western United States and the great gold and silver strikes between 1850-1900. Unlike other industries of the time that saw major changes in manufacturing processes, the process for producing the glass bottles remained the same. It was a process that gave each bottle special character, producing unique shapes, imperfections, irregularities, and various colors until 1900.

 At the turn of the century, Michael J. Owens invented the first fully automated bottle-making machine. Although many fine bottles were manufactured between 1900-1930. Owen’s invention ended an era of unique bottle design that no machine process could ever duplicate.

 We at Wholesale glass vases are ready to supply your business; with high quality vases, reasonable price and provide you excellent customer service.