29 replies to this topic

[Steph]

venwood, on 25 December 2010 - 08:40 PM, said:

I guess everyone needs to make there own decisions on that but it looks like miller was designing and modifing machines starting in 1911. I will read all this several time pretty slow going.Thanks again Stacy

Some additional dates:

I'm fairly sure - pretty much certain - that Miller wasn't making marble machines at the beginning.

Martin F. Christensen filed the patent for his groundbreaking glass marble making machine in 1902. Blobs of glass would be dropped by workers onto the machine, and the machine would make them round.

Akro was the 2nd company in the U.S. to use machines to manufacture marbles. They started making marbles in 1914, with machine designs stolen from Martin Christensen.

I assume that whichever marble machines Miller made would have been built with technology he learned and/or developed after 1914. Before that time, Martin Christensen had a pretty solid monopoly on the market.

To the best of my understanding.

[venwood]

I was just saying that millers glass company opened in 1911 and for 10 years M.F.C.had been making money selling marbles and I was thinking that everybody was trying to one up the other guy so he was thinking about or sneaking around to get info about machines years before he opened a glass company. The same with akro all the spying going on. Didn't akro have a patent on corkscrews and most of the machines were making swirled types slags and everyone trying to come up with something different. All this spectulation is addictive. Thanks for the info.Stacy

[Steph]

Glass was big business - all kinds of glass articles. Miller had plenty to keep himself busy without and/or before branching into machines which made spheres.

I don't think there was the kind of marble espionage which you might be imagining at that time. The person who stole the designs from MFC was a trusted family friend and an officer of the company.

One thing to keep in mind is that much of Miller's emphasis was on how to feed glass into/onto the devices which would shape the final product. That was good for much more than marbles.




A possibly interesting question would be to track down the companies Miller sold marble machines to. That 1948 story specifically mentioned toy marbles but most toy marbles were made in West Virginia, and didn't most West Virginia companies make their machines locally? I wonder if Miller's clients might have tended to have more of an industrial bent.

For instance, from whom did people who made things such as fiber glass ingots get their machines?

[lstmmrbls]

I think Peltier purchased a total of 11 Miller Machines. And the machines used at various factories would have been made somewhere besides the marble factories.

[Steph]

I phrased that wrong. I made it sound like I thought the marble companies made their own machines. I was thinking about them using local machinists. Lots of the 1940's machines seem traceable to one particular WV shop, iirc.



Tell us more about the Miller machines Peltier had. Also, I'm still fuzzy on what constitutes a "machine"? Rollers, tanks, feeders? Varies depending on context?

[lstmmrbls]

The machine was usually a funnel of some sort, a type of shear mechanism and the rounding auger shaped rollers. These could be moved about and were placed under the furnace and feeders which in some cases could be very complicated. At jabo there really is no feeder system as the glass runs from a hole in the furnace floor directly into the shear mechanism. Mike has some great pictures of the Miller machine. The one that was at Jabo was not all original as there were recently added and removed parts. The Miller machine for manufacturing marbles patent pic is really close to what they looked like.

[venwood]

What was the name of the shop that made marble machines in the 40's? Do you think that the earlier marble makers 1910-1930 made there own machines? Did peltier modify the machines they bought from Miller themsevles? Did Miller make marbles on his own or did he go to work for peltier?

[Steph]

I don't remember if I learned the name of the shop. The name of the machinist I was thinking of was George Murphy. That's given in AMMM's Playrite chapter. I've seen a little more info on the shop and workers there, but I think it's spread out between the AMMM chapters so I'll have to do more reading.

[lstmmrbls]

MFC made his machines. Of course he was a machinist and foundry owner.

[Steph]

Fisher / Vitro patents


Ornamental assembly and method of manufacturing the same
Patent number: 2094529
Filing date: Sep 20, 1935
Issue date: Sep 28, 1937
Henry A. Fisher