duraglas from a 1911 hospital dump site

[missabear]

a friend and i were digging in an old hospital dump site here in michigan. the hospital opened in 1911. it was closed down in 1959

I found some duraglas bottles there, lots were broken, a few intact .

one is a 2oz bottle with measuring gradient on the side and says pour here on the top. the other is a 3oz bottle with measuring on the side and an embossed 3iii on the top.

on the bottom of the 2oz bottle it has the logo in the middle which is a diamond shape with a circle over it and an I in the middle of the circle. to the left of the logo the plant number is 8 followed by a dot then to the right of the logo there is a 9 followed by a dot

on the 3 oz one it has the same logo the plant number on the left is 5 (i couldn't find that number on any list) the date number to the right is 6 no dots after any number.

i'm curious about the 3oz one because i couldn't find a plant listing for 5 . any idea of the dates? i'm curious, theres a whole junk yard left to excavate

 

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[surf]

Hello missabear,

"Duraglas - This was the proprietary name for a process used by the Owens-Illinois Glass Company where the surface of the hot, just produced bottles, were sprayed on the body, shoulder, and neck (not base or the top of the finish) with a stannic chloride vapor that allowed the tin to bond to the outer surface and providing scratch resistance and durability to the bottles. (Information courtesy of Phil Perry, engineer with that company.) This process - and the embossed notation of it ( in script) on the base of many Owens-Illinois products - began in 1940 and continued up until at least the mid-1950s, though the process is still in use today without the notation (Toulouse 1971; Miller & Morin 2004; Phil Perry, O-I engineer pers. comm. 2007)." Bottle Glossary Page

Plant 5 is a bit of a mystery. Since 1963 it has been Charlotte, Michigan, and is listed as a reassigned plant number.

"Oddly, Toulouse (1971:403) claimed that “there were no plants 5 and 19.” However, those numbers appear (with highly-legible embossing) on El Paso soda bottles. Two different bottles bearing the I-in-an-oval-superimposed- on-an-elongated-diamond manufacturer’s mark bear a “19” in the space to the left of the logo. Similarly, one container with the later I-in-an-oval mark shows a distinct “5” to the left of the logo. It is clear that Toulouse was confused about plant #5. In his table (Toulouse 1971:395; reproduced here as Table 1), he lists plant #5 in Charlotte, Michigan, opened about 1963. Although he calls it an “old number reassigned,” it is obviously a new plant number that was skipped earlier. Could he have also missed a plant #19?" http://www.fohbc.org/PDF_Files/Owens-Illinois_Lockhart.pdf

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