l Owens, at the end of the 19th century. In 1923, a gob feeder, which ensured a rapid supply of consistently sized gobs of glass, was developed, and this was combined with individual section machines in 1925 to allow simultaneous production of a number of bottles from one piece of equipment. This combination machine remains the basis of most automatic bottle-making machines today.
Flat glass technology underwent its first significant innovation when a Belgian named Fourcault developed a process by which a continuous sheet of glass of a consistent thickness could be drawn from a tank. Another Belgian, Bicheroux, developed another method for plate glass in which glass was poured from a pot directly through two rollers, again producing glass of even thickness, which made grinding and polishing easier. In 1910, a French scientist, Benedictus, developed a way of strengthening glass by a process of lamination, inserting a celluloid layer between two layers of glass. Around the same time, American glass companies were also improvin
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