‘Blowers Dogs’ During Day and Night Glassmaking Shifts
Glassmaking is historically a skilled craft, passing from mentor to apprentice, setting the youth up for their lifelong career. But this changed in the 1820s, when the mechanical press ended this tradition and created mass produced glass. Glassmaking was no longer the exclusive realm of skilled craftspeople; it became unskilled manual labor. Factories hired children, usually boys, to help with the work.
The boys, nicknamed “Blowers dogs,” would close molds around molten glass poured by glass blowers, and pick bottles out of the molds and moving them into the next phases of glass bottle production. Once glassmaking technology moved from semi-automated to fully automated, factories no longer needed children to assist in the process. The National Child Labor Committee sent Michael Owens, inventor of a fully automated glass bottle making machine, a thank you letter in 1913 for “eliminating more child labor than they had through legislation.”
