Irving Wightman Colburn was born on May 16, 1861 in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, United States. He was the eldest son of Henry Joseph and Eliza Ann (Siner) Colburn, both of English ancestry. His father, manager of a machine works and an inventor of wood-working machinery, had a well-equipped mechanical shop in his home, and here Colburn spent most of his time at his teens.
Colburn graduated from the high school.
Colburn spent a few years in the machine works with his father and then he established at the age of twenty-two Fitchburg’s first agency for the sale of electrical equipment. Within a year or two he began in a small way and as a side issue, the manufacture of dynamos and motors of his own design and, using one of his machines, made the first electric lighting installation in Fitchburg. He also installed the city’s first telephone system.
In 1891 Colburn organized the Colburn Electric Company in Fitchburg to engage in electrical equipment manufacture. The business thrived so well that four years later a new and larger plant was built. Difficulties then arose in securing working capital, chiefly because Colburn was financially unknown, his manufactured products having been sold under the name of his distributor; and after three years of unsuccessful effort to correct this error, the business was discontinued.
Colburn then went to Toledo, Ohio, and like his father who had preceded him there, became interested in glass manufacture. His innate inventive turn led him to experimentation in the fashioning of glass by mechanical means and eventually to drawing continuous sheets; and for the succeeding nineteen years until his death, he was engrossed in the solution of these problems. His work attracted to him world-wide attention and was crowned with success just a year before he died, when his process became the basis of the commercially successful Libbey-Owens Sheet Glass Company.
While his headquarters were in Toledo, Colburn conducted his preliminary work from 1899 to I917 in Frankford, Pennsylvania, patenting a number of glass-working machines as they were developed. For the next four years he was at work in Franklin, Pennsylvania, chiefly on a process for blowing tumblers and lamp chimneys, and it was while thus engaged that he began his experiment of mechanically drawing continuous sheets of glass. His basic patent, No. 876, 267, was granted January 7, 1908 and assigned to the Colburn Machine Glass Company. After several years of experimentation and the expenditure of much money with no appreciable financial return to his backers, Colburn sold his patents in 1912 to large financial glass interests in Toledo. With his assistance the process was brought to perfection in 1916 and a $2, 000, 000 plant was built near Charleston, West Virginia.
Colburn was married to Ida E. Hamlin of Toledo.
