Blow Molding - History of Blowing

History of Blowing

Enoch Ferngren and William Kopitke were the first verified people who used the blow molding process. The process principle comes from the idea of glassblowing. Ferngren and Kopitke produced a blow molding machine and sold it to Hartford Empire Company in 1938. This was the beginning of the commercial blow molding process. During the 1940s the variety and number of products was still very limited and therefore blow molding did not take off until later. Once the variety and production rates went up the number of products created followed soon afterwards. In the United States soft drink industry, the number of plastic containers went from zero in 1977 to ten billion pieces in 1999. Today, even a greater number of products are blown and it is expected to keep increasing.

For amorphous metals, also known as bulk metallic glasses (BMGs), blow molding has been recently demonstrated under pressures and temperatures comparable to plastic blow molding. This technique allows molding BMGs with an about 50 times higher strength than plastics into shapes that were previously not achievable with crystalline metals.