Summary

I don't know much about William Bock or Bock Laundry Machine Company, but I do know that I need to learn more about both. Mr. Bock appears to have worked with Michael Owens in bringing his first fully automated bottle making machine to life. Bock Laundry Machine Company appears to have been quite successful, too, and is known in legal circles for a Supreme Court case from the 1980s relating to impeachment of a civil witness with evidence of prior felony convictions regardless of any unfair prejudice that may result. Mr. Bock's earliest patents relate to glass-blowing machines. Bock and Owens both have multiple patents from the late 1800s and early 1900s that are assigned to the Toledo Glass Company, but Bock's name never seems to be mentioned in the popular history of industrial glass-making in Toledo.

Issue Date

1924-02-12

Filing Date

1922-04-28

Country

United States

Type

utility

Inventor(s)

William Emil Bock (Eagle Point Colony, Ohio)

Categories

us, utility, mechanical

Tags

appliances

Resources related to William Emil Bock and Bock Laundry Machine Company:

Green v. Bock Laundry Machine Co., 490 U.S. 504 (1989) on Justia.

Timeline: Owens-Illinois and the Glass Industry in Toledo - includes entry for 1902 re Bock helping Michael Owens with the first use of the automatic bottle-making machine.

Owens the Innovator at the University of Toledo Canaday Center for Special Collections (includes a mention of Bock, with the ever-present descriptor ‘a skilled engineer,’ but nothing else.)

Bock was clearly succesful financially. While his earliest patents list his residence as Toledo, Ohio, his later patents list it as Eagle Point Colony, a Toledo suburb that now exists only as a neighborhood in Rossford, Ohio and that includes some of the largest older homes in the Toledo area and that are situated on the Maumee River.