Libbey Owens Ford Glass Company

The Libbey-Owens-Ford Company (LOF) was a producer of flat glass for the automotive and building products industries both for original equipment manufacturers and for replacement use. The company's headquarters and main factories were located in Toledo, Ohio, with large float glass plants in Rossford, Ohio, Laurinburg, North Carolina, Ottawa, Illinois, Shreveport, Louisiana, and Lathrop, California. The company was formed by the merger of Libbey-Owens' flat-glass operation with the Edward Ford Plate Glass Company, both located in Toledo, in 1930.

The company's heritage dates back to 1818 with the founding of New England Glass Company of East Cambridge, Massachusetts, which relocated to Toledo, Ohio and in 1892 changed its name to Libbey Glass Company under the direction of Edward Drummond Libbey. In parallel, Michael Owens and associates completed work in 1902 on the first fully functioning automatic bottle-blowing machine (the successor of which was honored as an Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers), and in 1903 incorporated the Owens Bottle Machine Company. In 1912 Owens acquired rights to Irving Wightman Colburn's invention for manufacturing plate glass.