California Glass Insulator Company

GLASS MAKERS EFFECT MERGER.

Papers were signed at Los Angeles, Cal., on August 13th merging the Bloom Jar Co., of San Francisco, with the California Glass Insulator Co., of Los Angeles. The consolidated company will manufacture milk bottles and fruit containers, with Los Angeles as distributing center. The merging of these two concerns was announced in the August 14th issue of the Los Angeles "Times" as follows:

"Papers were signed here yesterday merging the Bloom Jar Co. of San Francisco, capitalized at $1,500,000, with the California Glass Insulator Co. of this city, whose plant between Long Beach and Wilmington represented an initial investment of $262,000. The prime object of the merger is to get the benefit of the low all-water rates which are expected to obtain between this port and the east with the opening of the Panama Canal.

"The Bloom Jar Co. is the patentee of automatic hermetically scaled glass bottles of various kinds, prominent among which is a sanitary milk bottle, which has been adopted for use by the army and navy at the suggestion of Surgeon General Blue. The company also manufactures vacuum fruit containers and has large contracts with the Heinz company of Pittsburg, for the use of the same. With the manufacture of these containers here, in the midst of the fruit country, it is expected that the fruit-conserving business will receive a wonderful impetus.

"For the present, the patented caps for these containers will be all that will be manufactured locally, the bottles or jars being manufactured in the east. The discovery recently, however, of glass sand of high quality, near Monterey, means, according to David Bloom, president of the Bloom company, that all parts will be manufactured in Southern California.

"'It is a plain, simple business proposition,' said Bloom, yesterday. 'At present, 600 carloads of soda bottles, 300 carloads of beer bottles, and a similar number of carloads of milk bottles are used yearly in Southern California. To ship these bottles here from Illinois and other producing centers costs around $500 a carload: We hope eventually to supply the Southern California market with home-made goods that will not only cost the consumer less, but will be of higher quality.'

In order to handle the increasing business, the Long Beach plant of the California Glass Insulator Co. will, according to President Arthur G. Munn, immediately increase its working force to 500 employes. This company now supplies nearly all the glass insulators used by the Western Union and Postal Telegraph companies, as well as the railroads, west of the Rocky mountains. These insulators are manufactured under contract. This company was organized some years ago as a closed corporation as a direct result of the splendid climatic conditions which Southern California affords for the blowing of glass, but more particularly because the ocean breezes militate against the summer shut-down that has always been a feature of glass making in the east.

"President Bloom of the merged companies will move his family here from San Francisco this week and will open a distributing office in this city to handle both foreign and domestic business. This office will have supervision over the companies in Japan now manufacturing porcelain containers with the Bloom cap."