Interview with Robert Good

One of the People:

Glass Maker

Robert Good Jr., Once Associated With Factory

His Father Built in Poughkeepsie

By HELEN MYERS

It's something of a jolt to hear him give his name as Robert Good Jr. He's quite a bit past the age when most men use Jr., and makes no secret of it. He says quite frankly that he was 15 when he came to Poughkeepsie in October 1880, so it isn't too hard to arrive at his age, even if you use the 10-finger system of computation.

After a few minutes' conversation with him it's obvious why he uses the Jr. when he returns to Pough­keepsie, as he did recently for a brief visit — his home has been in Wash­ington, Pa., since 1902. To those old enough to remember the name, Rob­ert Good indicates the man who built the old Poughkeepsie Glass Works and was its inside manager for many years. The Jr. tells them that this is his son, who rose to be assistant foreman at the local plant.

Glass has provided Robert Good Jr., with his bread, butter and jam all his life, and there are few men who can tell you as much about the changing methods of making and handling it. His father was a glass blower m England when he was a youngster, before the days of the continuous melting process, and at least two features of modern glass factories are based on apparatus Robert Good Jr. designed.

Born In England

He was born in Sunderland, Coun­ty Durham, in the north of England where the Sunderland airplanes are now manufactured. When young Robert was 9, Robert Sr., packed his family off to Dublin, where he start­ed a little glass factory in partner­ship with an Irishman. Their prin­cipal product was whiskey bottles of nearly opaque black glass, made with red clay. Unfortunately, the Irish partner was too fond of what their bottles carried, and the little factory went into bankruptcy three years after it was organized.

Glass was then generally made by melting the ingredients in clay pots at night, then working it out during the day. Meanwhile, German makers were developing a continuous melt­ing tank that made it possible to melt the raw materials and make glass simultaneously 24 hours a day. This new process "went like wild fire" in the first 10 years after its discovery, Mr. Good recalls.

Britten's Patent Glass company of Northamptonshire, England, was one of the first to have a continuous melting tank or furnace installed. It hired a man named Siemens, of a famous German family of inventors, to come from Germany to install the tank, and hired Robert Good Sr, as manager of its new plant. The pro­duct of this company was very strong, very pretty olive green glass made by throwing hot iron slag into the furnace with the basic mater­ials, sand, lime and soda.

Sent for Father

Within the next year or so the Poughkeepsie Glass works was organized, and representatives were sent to England to find a man ex­pert enough to build and operate a continous [sic] continuous glass tank for them. They found Robert Good Sr.

"Daddy was about 38 then," Mr. Good recalls. "I have a hand-writ­ten note at home asking him to take the job and offering him $150 a month. That was big wages at that time, especially for a bottle blower who was just blossoming out into a manager. He was quite a bright chap — he wore a seven and a half hat."

There wasn't "anything there at all" when Robert Sr., arrived in Poughkeepsie in July, '79, and be­gun to build the glass works at the foot of Dutchess avenue where the A. C Dutton Lumber company is located today, Mr Good says. Some of the flues and pieces of pavement that his father built are still there. In those days, a glass furnace had to be rebuilt about every two years — this rebuilding must be done even more frequently now — because the intense heat scars and burns out the brick. Mr. Good Sr., used this old fire brick for the pavement that is still in the Dutton yard.

Robert Sr., left his family in Eng­land when he came to Poughkeep­sie, and his two sons, Robert Jr., and Jonathan, were especially in­terested in the letterhead of the new firm. It read: "Poughkeepsie Glass Works, The Whale Dock, Pough­keepsie." The boys had been brought up on stories their grandfather had told of sailing up the Hudson some 70 miles when he was a whaling captain 30 years before, and putting in at "the Whale dock" for supplies. Robert Jr., remembers that the old dock was still there in his boyhood, a slip just south of the glass factory yard, where the boys went swimming.

Studied Science

Robert Jr. followed his father to Poughkeepsie in October, 1880. For the next six weeks he attended grammar school at the corner of Bridge and Mill streets. Then his father listened to his pleading to let him go to work at the glass factory and learn the trade. Three years later his father sent him back to England to school.

"I had a year in Durham College of Science in New Castle on Tyne," he recalls. "Boy, how I had to study to matriculate. Daddy had a brother who was a schoolmaster, and I spent five or six weeks at his house getting ready." At college he studied four subjects, chemistry, mathematics, physics and geology. "I had my dreams all set to be a bachelor of science, but I didn’t even get to be an associate, Daddy went broke. He'd bought some stock. So I came back to the glass factory and went to blowing."

In those days all glass was blown by mouth through a pipe about four feet long. Mr. Good still has a glass blower's pipe in his attic at home. Although it was a disappointment to leave school, he liked his work and took pride in it. He has always taken pride in his work, he says with a flash of bright blue eyes.

"But I was always dreaming about the possibilities of making bottles by machinery." he remembers, "of run­ning glass out in a stream, instead of getting it out with an iron rod.

My fellow bottle blowers used to say, "They'll never do THIS by machinery, I used to give them the laugh, because I was so sure it would be done. Bottles aren't made any other way now."

Wanted Own Plant

He worked up to the post of assistant foreman at the local plant, but it was no secret that he wanted to have his own factory. In fact, R. Williams, the superintendent, once observed that it would pay local plant to give him another $1,000 a year to keep him. But his mind was made up, and in 1895 he left for Denver, Colo., where he rented a defunct factory and rebuilt a tank. He operated his own factory for four and a half years, experimenting all the time with new methods, until a defective part of the tank gave way one night, and the whole factory burned down.

"I was limited for capital," he says philosophically. "That tank wasn't what it should have been, but I was getting by with it, until the fire."

During that four and a half years he had partly developed a machine to make fruit Jars. The Poughkeep­sie Glass Works now asked him to come hack and develop his machine. He returned late in 1899. The local plain furnished the backing for two years, when "it sort of got cold feet and gave him permission to look for another sponsor.

During his experimentation he had made jars of various types for Beechnut Packing company. The secretary introduced him to C. N. Brady, later the president of Hazel Atlas Glass company, which was then being organized. Mr. Brady invited him to go to Washington, Pa., with one of the Hazel Atlas plants. Mr. Good accepted the offer in 1902, and has been with the company ever since.

Develops Improvements

When be left Poughkeepsie in 1902 he was married and had four chil­dren, Bess, Gilbert, Hazel and Hettie, named for his wife, the former Hettie Kipp of Poughkeepsie. His two younger brothers, Jonathan and Isaac, were then employed in the local plant. Jonathan retired about a year ago as factory superintendent of Liberty Glass company in Sapulpa, Okla., and Isaac is the retired chief inspector of the S. K. F. Ball Bearing plant of Philadelphia.

During the past 40 years Robert Good Jr. has developed improvements in the glass-making industry. Some of them are on the scrap heap, he says, superseded by still newer machinery developed by "men who have more brains in a minute than I have in a month." However, two processes in modern glass factories are done with apparatus he perfected. One delivers raw material into the tank, floats is away, and distributes it over the surface while glass is being fused or melted.

At the other end of the tank, refined glass is delivered in regulated charges — in the wanted amounts — to the molds on machines that make it into bottles, jars and other re­ceptacles. Many of these were designed by Mr. Good. But don't call him an inventor.

"I don't like the word," he says positively. "That's prejudice, of course, perhaps because I've known so many crazy ones who felt that just because they started something they ought to own it. I call myself a handy mechanic."

As that statement hints, Mr. Good doesn't think that "anyone should be allowed to monopolize a patent." He believes that the government should take over every patent, lease it to everyone who wants to use it, pay the inventor a reasonable return, and use the balance to support the Patent office.

"That isn't an original idea of mine, but I say 'Amen' to it," he says, "If that happened, progress would go by leaps and bounds where crawls now. I believe that many improvements have been buried because of patents. The people or companies who own a patent tie it up so no one else can use it, or put the price so high no one else no one can buy it."

He has just as much enthusiasm for modern, machine-made glass. When he was blowing glass with a pipe, he says, the blowers used to be told they would be allowed an ounce of tolerance each way. Now bottles don't vary a sixteenth of an ounce. And the bottom of a hand blown bottle is often three-eights of an inch thicker on one side than the other, he recalls.

"We used to call that a heel tap, but it went," he says with disgust, "A machine won't do such poor work."