Ford Motor Company and Libby Owens Ford float glass development

1920s continuous-pour plate-glass process developed by Henry Ford with Libby-Owens-Ford for mass automobile production. Intermediate step between Pittsburgh Plate Glass and the Pilkington float process.

In the 1920s, Ford Motor Company needed a lot of glass because they were mass-producing automobiles. There was a company that came out of this called Libby-Owens-Ford. Libby-Owens-Ford and Ford Motor Company — Henry Ford — developed a process where they would melt the glass in a great big vat, the size of this room. It takes a while to melt glass, because glass has lousy thermal conductivity. You heat it up, and to get the glass bath uniform in temperature, if you're pouring the raw materials in at that end of the room, you want it slowly, as it gets to this end of the room, which might take a week in production, to be fairly uniform in composition, because it's so viscous. It's thicker than syrup; it's more like honey at the temperatures you might be working at. They'd pull it out in a continuous stream onto a metal table with rollers, and they made roll plate glass just like before, but now it was a continuous process. That was in the 1920s.