Franklin, Pennsylvania, where he interested some of his
friends in assisting him to carry on his experiments from 1901
to 1905, on an idea he had for a machine to blow cylinder glass.
His ideas proved to be merely fantastic dreams and while he did
succeed in mechanically producing a few cylinders, they were of
poor quality and the cost of operation was prohibitive. During
these six years he continually had in mind the idea of producing
glass in sheet form by mechanical means without the necessity of
first making it in the cylindrical form.
We find now that this idea has been in
the minds of many glass men, both here and in other countries,
for the past half century as evidenced by he array of paper
patents on sheet glass from the patents of Clark and Loup in
1857 up to the present day. It remained, however, for Colburn
to give to the world the first workable machine producing commercial
flat-drawn sheet glass. His first idea embodied
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