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The art of melting and forming glass into flat and decorative shapes has been around for thousands of years. The names given to different types of glass often depend upon the products used in the glass batch and the process used to form the glass. Soda-lime glass is the most common term used for the majority of flat glass product formulations, while ceramic and borosilicate glasses are typically specialty glass compositions. Float glass is the term that applies to the most common flat glass production method. An earlier methodology that no longer exists in the United States is the sheet glass process, where a ribbon of glass is pulled directly out of the molten glass pool.

The term plate glass typically refers to a process where molten glass was poured onto a table, rolled until flattened, then exposed to systematic grinding and polishing. Rolled glass refers to the processing of passing molten glass through a series of rollers to produce such products as patterned glass (where the glass has a decorative pattern imprinted on it) and wired glass (where a welded steel mesh is introduced into the molten glass).

The first advances in automating glass manufacturing were patented in 1848 by Henry Bessemer, an English engineer. His system produced a continuous ribbon of flat glass by forming the ribbon between rollers. This was an expensive process, as the surfaces of the glass needed polishing. If the glass could be set on a perfectly smooth body this would cut costs considerably. Attempts were made to form flat glass on a molten tin bath, notably in the US. Several patents were awarded, but this process was unworkable.

Towards the end of the 19th century, the American engineer Michael Owens (1859–1923) invented an automatic bottle blowing machine which only arrived in Europe after the turn of the century. Owens was backed financially by E. D. L. Libbey, owner of the Libbey Glass Co. of Toledo, Ohio. By the year 1920, in the United States, there were around 200 automatic Owens Libbey Suction Blow machines operating. In Europe, smaller, more versatile machines from companies like O'Neill, Miller and Lynch were also popular.

Owens' machines could be built with from six to twenty arms, each blowing a bottle. The machine would cut loose the finished piece and deliver it to a conveyor taking it to the annealing oven. Since a fifteen-arm machine could do as much work as originally done by a dozen or more skilled glassworkers, depending on the size and shape of the product, there was a dramatic saving in labour costs. One version of his bottle-blowing machine, the “AR” contained 10 000 parts and weighed 50 tons.

Meanwhile, Libbey and Owens had helped fund Irving W Colburn, who since 1900 had been working on a machine capable of continuously drawing flat sheet glass. In 1912, they bought the patents to this machine, which Owens perfected, and the Libbey-Owens Sheet Glass Company was opened in 1916 to make window glass.

Added impetus was given to automatic production processes in 1923 with the development of the gob feeder, which ensured the rapid supply of more consistently sized gobs in bottle production. Soon afterwards, in 1925, IS (individual section) machines were developed. Used in conjunction with the gob feeders, IS machines allowed the simultaneous production of a number of bottles from one piece of equipment. The gob feeder-IS machine combination remains the basis of most automatic glass container production today.

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