Libbey-Owens-Ford: The Glass That Kept You Safe at Sixty Miles Per Hour

In nineteen twenty-eight, a Toledo company changed what it meant to drive an automobile. Libbey-Owens, the glass manufacturer whose flat glass plant sat in Rossford, just south of the city, became the first company in the world to produce automotive laminated safety glass in commercial quantities. Henry Ford's company signed a contract to put it in every windshield on the new Model A. After that, the windshield that shatters into a thousand razor shards and blinds the driver in a crash became a thing of the past.

Libbey-Owens merged with the Edward Ford Plate Glass Company in nineteen thirty to form Libbey-Owens-Ford. The Ford in question was Edward Ford, no relation to Henry, who had built a massive plate glass plant along the Maumee River in Rossford in eighteen ninety-nine. The combined company became one of the largest flat glass manufacturers in the world, and General Motors quickly made it the sole supplier of windshields and automotive glass for all its vehicles, a relationship that held for thirty years.

At its peak, Libbey-Owens-Ford produced glass for nearly every car sold in America. The float glass process, developed by Pilkington in Britain, which spreads molten glass onto a bath of molten tin to create perfectly flat, optically clear sheets, later became standard practice, and Libbey-Owens-Ford ran float lines at its Rossford plants.

The glass business was sold to Pilkington of Britain in nineteen eighty-six. But the Rossford plant, the Maumee River, and the research that happened in the facilities between them were part of an industrial geography that remade how the world saw through moving vehicles.