Pick up a jar of jam or a bottle of beer and you are holding something formed in a matter of seconds, by a machine whose ancestors worked much like a child’s music box.
For centuries every bottle was blown by hand, and its quality rested entirely on the skill of the glassblower. Consistency was hard to come by. In the early 1900s the Owens bottle machine turned glassmaking from a craft into an industry, but the real breakthrough was the Individual Section, or IS, machine; Still the backbone of glass container production today.

Every part of a glass container has a job to do. Here’s a quick tour from top to bottom. A glass bottle looks simple, but every part of it is designed for a purpose: sealing, strength, labelling or stability on the filling line. Knowing the names of the parts makes specifications clearer and problems quicker to solve. The same anatomy applies to jars too. They just have a wider mouth, a much shorter neck and a steeper shoulder.

Sand is one of the most abundant materials on earth; But the glass container industry is highly selective about which sand it uses. The reason comes down to chemistry, and it matters more than most people outside the industry realise.