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The Evolution of Getting a Living in Middletown

Ball Brothers Glass Manufacturing Company factory fan

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Mechanization: The Dawn of Metal Workers By the late nineteenth century, industrial production started to become increasingly complex and required large machines. Manufacturing operations could not be housed in a craftsman’s shop or workplace. This need to organize machines and workers in one setting prompted the creation of modern American factories. The shift to complex machines in large factories had the obvious effect of making individual skilled labor less necessary. Why would you pay 10 skilled craftsmen when a machine can produce 10 times more in a fraction of the time? This was the first step in changing the face of American manufacturing and had a particularly evident in its impact on Muncie's glass makers.

This transition took place in Muncie during and after the Gas Boom across many industries. Writing about glass production, the Lynds reported that
“The coming of machine brains and brawn is vividly revealed by the tool-using process in a local glass plant in 1890 and today. Then, the blowing process of glass jars was almost entirely a hand skill. The furnace in which the glass was melted held eight to fourteen “pots” of molten glass, each pot being the focus of the activities of a “shop” or crew of two highly skilled “blowers” and three boy assistants-one “gatherer,” one “taking-out boy,” and one “carry-in boy”[1].
Human efficiency simply could stand up to automated machinery. It was not just that these machines could work faster, they could also work in situations that workers could not. For example, when heat waves would hit Muncie the workers would need to take longer breaks throughout the day in fear of heat stroke. An example of this is also provided by the Lynds in their description of factory work before machines: “On hot days in early summer the pauses might have to come every half hour; in midsummer the plants closed down entirely. It is important to note that the speed and rhythm of the work were set by the human organism, not by a machine.”[2]

An excellent example of the progression to machine-driven production comes from the Ball Brothers Company, specifically their glass-blowing operations. The Ball Brothers were a cornerstone of Muncie industry and any change in their operations had wide-reaching effects over the whole of Middletown. In his Memoirs, Frank Clayton Ball details how multiple generations of glass-blowing machines resulted in fewer and fewer workers as time moved on. In 1898 the Ball Company developed a machine that would be later called the F.C. Ball machine. This device was created to press the glass into jars. According to Ball, this machine needed 4 different workers to efficiently operate: “a gatherer, a presser, a take-out boy, and a carry-in boy.”[3] This status quo within Ball Company glass factories only lasted for two years until the company's machine shop developed a new model for a glass machine. In the year 1900, the Ball Bingham semi-automatic machine was created. This new model ran automatically through electricity, thus removing the need for a presser. The machine required the assistance of only two humans to function properly. In Ball’s own words “This Ball-Bingham machine, requiring only one gatherer and one take-out boy further increased the production and reduced the cost.”[4] By 1910, the company had purchased Owens Bottle Machines, further reducing the need for workers, including children. In the span of a few years the number of workers needed to operate Ball glass pressing machines was cut by more than half, and skilled work was mostly eliminated. This is only a small microcosm of how the gradual march of technology changed the nature of manufacturing work, both in Muncie and the rest of America’s industrial centers. As the Lynds reported, “Today this entire process, save the last step of transporting to the packing room, occurs without the intervention of the human hand. The development of the Owens and other bottle-blowing machines shortly after 1900 'eliminated all skill and labor' and rendered a hand process that had come largely unchanged from the early Egyptians as obsolete as the stone ax.”[5]

Similar changes occurred in other Muncie industries, such as auto parts production and steel making, transforming shop-floor experiences for most of the city's working class and creating new hardships for them.

[1] Robert Staughton Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1929), 40.
[2] Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 41.
[3] Frank Clayton Ball, Memoirs of Frank Clayton Ball (Muncie, Indiana: Privately Printed, 1937), 87.
[4] Ball, Memoirs, 88.
[5] Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 41.