Filling and Capping Bottles of Milk, Buffalo, N. Y.

Creator

Keystone View Company

Preview

Creation Date

1905

Description

This lantern slide shows milk being packaged into bottles and capped on automated assembly lines. Before milk was mass-bottled and sold by grocers, milkmen would fill nearly any container families provided. The lack of standardization meant milkmen could end up filling anything from small bottles to larger mason jars. It was not until 1878 that a man named George Henry Lester standardized milk containers by patenting milk jar sizes for packaging. Lester was the first to standardize a milk container size, reducing the chaos in the milk industry. However, it was Lewis P. Whitman who was the first to patent the standardized milk bottle design, which became the iconic image most people think of when picturing a milk bottle. Building upon Lester and Whitman’s achievements, a businessman named Alex Campbell was the first to buy the rights to use standardized bottles for packaging milk and selling to grocers. Other entrepreneurs followed suit, but the achievements of these three individuals helped the burgeoning milk industry to become a key part of the American and world food industries.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.