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While the big bottle company was going into the can business, the bottle industry was being attacked on another front. Last week Borden Co., big milk distributor, announced that milk sold to 200 stores of American Stores Co. in northern New Jersey would be packaged in Pure-Pak, a container made of spruce-fibre lined with paraffin. Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea stores were also said to be interested in Pure-Pak milk. Milk bottles cost between 4¢ and 5¢ but make 20 trips at an average cost of about ^ a trip. The paper con- tainer costs from 1¼¢ to 1½¢, makes only one trip. But it is much cheaper to deliver milk in paper than in glass. A 1½-ton truck (heat insulated and requiring no ice ) can deliver 2,000 quarts of milk weighing 4,000 lb. The same 2,000 quarts delivered in a non-insulated five-ton truck would include 4,000 lb. of milk, 4.000 lb. of glass, 2,500 lb. of wooden cases, 1,000 lb. of ice. The Metropolitan New York area consumes about 110,000,000 quarts of milk a month, of which less than 10% is delivered in paper packages. In the Philadelphia area, only other region in which milk is sold in quantity in paper, the paper percentage also is less than 10%. Spread of the paper container has been hampered by the fact that in some States retailers have been forced to charge 1¢ a quart more for packaged than for bottled milk.
Neither bottle maker nor flat-glass maker is Corning Glass Works of Corning, N. Y., famed as caster of the two 200-in., 20-ton telescope mirrors which are the world's biggest pieces of glass (TIME, April 12, 1934). Corning is a closely-held, privately-owned company dominated by the Houghton family, glass makers since one Amory Houghton built a glass plant in Somerville, Mass, in 1851. Nominal head of the company is Alanson Bigelow Houghton, who was U. S. Ambassador to Germany (1922-25), later U. S. Ambassador to Great Britain (1925-29). At 72, the onetime Ambassador has turned over active direction to his son Amory Houghton, 36-year-old Harvard graduate who worked in the glassblowing department before becoming a company executive and who heads the Boy Scouts in the Corning district. The Corning Glass Works makes electric light bulbs, thermometers, rail-way-signals, laboratory equipment, art-glass, all manner of glass specialties. It developed Pyrex. a heat-resisting glass most familiar in the form of baking-dishes but also used in radio and other insulation.
Most recent Corning product is Top-of-Stove glass, developed by a team of Corning Ph. D.s under the captaincy of burly, wisecracking Research Director John Clyde Hostetter. They were looking for a glass which could be put on the top of the stove (not merely in the oven) and with which food could be served in the same dish in which it was prepared. Experimenting with 1,500 formulae, they cooked 18,000 lb. of potatoes and nearly as much hamburg, fed Coming's stray dogs on the results of their experiments. They cooked on wood, oil and coal stoves, five types of gas ranges, twelve kinds of electric ranges. Sometimes they cooked until the food was burned dry, to see if the glass would stand the continued heat. Eventually they found a glass of which each centimetre expanded only .00000385 cm. per degree of temperature raised, and which continued to hold its heat-resisting properties even through many reheatings.