Hemingray's tank operated; turned out 300,000 bottles today

FLOW OF BOTTLES STARTS

HEMINGRAY’S

FIRST TANK

OPERATED

300,000 Bottles Turned

Out Today.

250 TO GET JOBS

Second Tank Will Be

Started Thursday.

BY JOHN LEWELLEN.

At 8 a. m. Tuesday Hemingray Glass Company machines belched forth their first bottle for the newly legalized 3.2 per cent beer. That bottle symbolized employment for 250 employes of the factory in­definitely, certainly for months.

Five machines feeding from one of the gigantic tanks began an output of nearly 300,000 bottles per day. Thursday a second big tank will start operation in the manufacture of beer bottles. Wednesday manu­facture of insulators will be resumed.

Giant Orders Received.

By the end of the week 250 former employes will be back on the job. Two-thirds of the plant’s tonnage capacity will have been reached and the payroll will be only about 50 names short of the maximum num­ber which the factory normally em­ployes.

Orders are on Hand to keep pro­duction up for four or five months. Beyond that, production is proble­matical. of course, but if the nation is as thirsty for real beer as it has indicated, Hemingray’s will be busy for years.

The factory has been closed down only since November.

The Hemingray Glass Company started the manufacture of glass in 1848. The factory has been in Muncie since 1887. No other glass company in the United States has been operated continuously as long and throughout the period the factory has been under the control of one family.

How Bottles Are Made.

Today the factory is one of the best equipped and most automatic in the country.

Tuesday morning I was taken on a tour of the factory and saw how beer bottles are made.

Ingredients of the "batch’' are re­ceived by train and mixed at the plant. Principal ingredients are sand, soda ash and lime. After be­ing carefully proportioned, the ma­terials are mixed by a rotating hop­per. The batch is conveyed from the hopper to the tanks in large "unit buckets." Automatic chain conveyors would destroy the correct proportion of the materials in the mixture.

Terrific Heat Used.

In the tanks the batch is sub­jected to a melting temperature of 2,600 degrees, F. Two methods of checking temperature are used, to guard against error, and tempera­ture is taken from many points in the tank. Gas for heating the tanks is manufactured at the plant. Air is forced along the outside of the tank at the metal line for cooling, because it is at the metal line that the tank receives its greatest wear.

After flowing from the main tank through a throat to the refining tank, the molten glass is ready to be transformed into bottles.

No Mistakes Made.

Automatically exactly the right amount of glass for the bottle is dropped into a "blank mold." A com­pressed aid [sic] air plunger hits the tops of the glass in the mold, and in the bottom of the mold the crown fin­ish or top of the bottle is finished. The mold then turns over as the arms of the machine rotate and from then on the bottle is handled by the neck ring, formed as soon as the glass entered the blank mold.

As the machine holds the bottle by the neck ring, the blank mold opens and the blow mold, held on another rotating arm, clamps over the bottle. The rotating arm pauses. Compressed air is shot through the neck ring into the hot glass, forcing it against the sides of the mold, and the bottle in blown into form.

At the next pause of the mold, air again is blown into the bottle forc­ing part of the glass still molten back into place and giving the bot­tle its final form. Two more pauses or "stations" continue to cool the glass, the mold opens and the com­plete bottle drops to the endless chain to join thousands of its fel­lows.

Tests Made Hourly.

Each machine has eight molds. All molds, of course are made in the factory's own machine shop. Letter­ing and ornamental designs on the bottle are cut into the mold and are formed as the bottles are blown into shape.

Nearly all machinery is operated by compressed air, including the giant blowing machines. Air is com­pressed at the factory, electric motors for this purpose running as high as 500 horsepower.

This is only part of the complete manufacturing habitude. Bottles are tested each hour, more often than in any other bottle factory. Bottles are changed abruptly from hot to cold water to test heat shock srength [sic] strength. A mechanical device tests the bottles for internal pressure and mechanical strength.

A polariscope, working on the principal of polarized light, shows whether the process of annealing has relieved all strains in the glass itself. Bottles are cut into cross-section to make sure that bottoms and sides are of uniform thickness. In all, the bottles are tested for 50 possible defects.

Inspectors stand at the machines to throw out obviously defective bot­tles, in addition to the more minute laboratory inspection. All bottles are pasteurized.

Manufacturing processes complet­ed, bottles are conveyed on endless chains to the cars, and even inside the cars.