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President of Pittsburgh Plate since 1928 has been Harry S. Wherrett, a onetime office boy. A great Pittsburgh booster and member of the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce, he is advertising his city and his company by putting the little known Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra on the radio in a Pittsburgh Plate Glass half hour. The program, scheduled to begin on Feb. 27, will be broadcast over a 40-station NBC hookup. An added civic note is supplied by the fact that the orchestra leader, Antonio Modarelli, is a native Pittsburgher.
The bottle or, as the bottle man always calls it, the container division of the glass business, is not so concentrated as the flat glass division, although a half dozen companies account for about 80% of the business. In 1935 the U. S. used some 5,300,000,000 bottles compared to about 10,000,000,000 cans. Biggest bottle company is Toledo's Owens-Illinois which last autumn made itself even bigger by acquiring Libbey Glass Manufacturing Co., a tumbler-maker not to be confused with Libbey-Owens-Ford. Owens-Illinois makes some two-thirds of all U. S. beer bottles, is therefore the bottle company most annoyed at canned beer. But Owens-Illinois' President William Edward Levis did not take canned beer lying down. Last week he announced the purchase of two tin can factories—Tin Decorating Co. of Baltimore and Enterprise Can Co. of McKees Rocks, Pa. Tin Decorating, a subsidiary of American Tobacco Co., manufactured tobacco cans. For it Owens-Illinois paid $3,320,000 cash. Enterprise Can made a general line of cans, not including beer cans. The two companies, and possibly others to be added, will be organized into Owens-Illinois Can Co. To run his new company, Mr. Levis picked an old can-maker, Frederick Adolph Prahl, who was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, but was brought to New York at the age of 2. From 1907 to 1913 he worked for American Can Co., later moved to Continental Can where he became vice president in charge of manufacturing. It was announced that Owens-Illinois Can would not number beer cans among its products, that the can companies had been acquired merely to round out Owens-Illinois' line of containers. As far as competition with American Can or with Continental Can was concerned, observers thought that a $6,000,000 investment was too much for a gesture and too little for a threat.
Owens-Illinois made $7,819,000 in 1935 as against $6,496,000 in 1934. This was the best profit in Owens-Illinois' history and did not include earnings of the recently acquired Libbey Glass Manufacturing Co.
Owens-Illinois is also engaged in completing in Toledo the world's first glass house—a two-story structure built of hollow glass blocks. Scheduled for completion by February, it will be used as an Owens-Illinois research laboratory. The building is made up of 80,000 glass blocks, has 39 rooms. Because of the building material, no windows are necessary, and in solving the problem of the windowless structure, Owens-Illinois claimed that it had taken a long step forward in making air-conditioning practical. The glass house also contains another important Owens-Illinois product: spun glass, or glass wool, woven into thick mats and used as insulator of heat and sound. It is likely to be a long time before many people live in glass houses, but glass insulation is a much more immediate rabbit in the Owens-Illinois' hat.