New achievement for Owens:

As engineers in the Toledo area and nationwide celebrate Engineer´s Week, it seems appropriate that famed Toledo inventor Michael J. Owens receives yet another honor. This time it´s not just for his automatic bottle-blowing machine or any of dozens of other inventions. No, this time, Mr. Owens, who died 81 years ago, has become a comic-strip hero. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers has put a cartoon strip featuring the Owens bottle-blowing machine on a Web site. He is the second in a series of 12 honoring some of the greatest engineering achievements in the group´s 125-year history. Toledo-area engineers have another reason to be proud of this national attention: The idea came from a former Toledoan, Capt. Vincent Wilczynski, a professor of mechanical engineering at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn. The concluding three panels highlight significant facts about the machine. "We hope that the colorful and fun-to-read comics will help inspire the next generation of engineers and inventors," said Captain Wilczynski. He added that "growing up in the Toledo area I was surrounded by the glass industry, and Michael Owens came to mind." Mr. Wilczinski was a Blade carrier for four years in the 1970s, and in 1976 he and two other carriers were credited with rescuing a man and his two sons from a foundering boat in the Maumee River. The graduate of St. Adalbert´s school and St. Francis High School went on to get a PhD in engineering. He worked with Ron Spellman, a Coast Guard petty officer and artist, to develop the series of "Heroes of Engineering" comic strips, beginning with Robert Henry Thurston, a pioneer of engineering education, in January. The Owens bottle machine was chosen for February to represent the decade of the 1890s, during which he patented some of his first automatic glass-blowing machinery. The strips are displayed on www.asme.org. A photograph of Owens inspecting a bottle from his invention is the real-life version of the event in the comic-strip panel. Mr. Owens himself was not an engineer. He was a glassblower by training, but he had worked his way up to manager of Toledo´s Libbey Glass plant before he perfected his invention. He worked well with engineers, including William Emil Bock, who helped him devise the machinery that merited patents in the 1890s and for the perfected version in 1903. His machinery helped bring the eight-hour day to the glass industry and was credited with helping eliminate the child labor that was prevalent in bottle factories in the late 19th century. In 1983, the mechanical engineers´ society named the Owens "AR" bottle machine an International Historic Engineering Landmark. The group called the machine "the most significant advance in glass production in over 2,000 years." The Owens name lived on - as part of Owens-Illinois Inc., which dates its founding to 1903; Owens Corning, which grew out of O-I; the former Libbey-Owens-Ford Co. (now a part of Pilkington PLC), and Owens Community College. And so did the Bock name: Mr. Bock founded several firms, including one that´s now known as Bock Engineered Products, a Toledo maker of laundry extractors and centrifuges. Mr. Wilczynski said only six of the comic strips are completed, but the others will be introduced to the Web site in coming months. The ones done include, for March, Orville and Wilbur Wright´s development of the wind tunnel, and, for April, the story of Garrett Morgan, an African-American who invented the inhalator, better known as the gas mask. Among others that will appear this year are Al Thompson´s invention of the rotary food sterilizer that revolutionized the food-canning industry. Mr. Wilczynski said the project has been fun for him. "I learned a lot about engineers," he said. And he said he hopes youngsters will appreciate that the "creative genius of engineers has made our world a better place to live."