A1 O'Neal, age 10, of Chester, Pa., for his question:

HOW ARE BOTTLES MADE?

Bottles may be made of glass, plastic, earthenware or metals such as steel and aluminum, and they are used as containers for holding liquids.

Early man made bottles of animal skins, sewing them often so that one leg would form the bottleneck. The Bible mentions that goatskin bottles were used by desert tribes.

  Stoneware and glass bottles began to replace skin bottles about 2,000 years ago. Historians tell us that man probably learned how to blow glass more than 100 years before the birth of Christ. The first bottle was probably made in Syria.

Early man probably discovered that molten glass could be placed at the end of a hollow iron pipe. By blowing into the pipe, a bottle could be made with the glass. Years later, at some unknown date, man discovered that molten glass could be placed inside a mold. Then, when the glass was blown, the glass took the exact shape of the mold.

Today most bottles are made of glass. Almost all of these bottles are manufactured on automatic machinery by pressing and blowing.

Raw materials for making bottle glass arrive in batches in the furnace feeding hopper. The hopper feeds the materials to the melting furnace, where the temperature reaches almost 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Next, the molten glass sinks to the bottom of the furnace and flows to an automatic feeder, which cuts off red hot globs and drops them into a chute.

The chute delivers each glob to the mold section of the bottlemaking machine where it is molded into a blank and then blown into a bottle.

The take off arm transfers the bottles to a conveyor belt, which next carries them through the annealing oven, or lehr, where they cool gradually.

Bottlemaking in the United States today is a very important industry.

In 1904, an American named Michael Owens patented an automatic machine that operates by a combination of vacuum and blowing. The Owens machine was one of the first examples of mechanization in the glass industry.

Another milestone in this industry was the glob feeder, a machine that drops a glob of hot glass into a forming mold at regular intervals.

The United States leads the world in the manufacture of glass containers. There are more than 100 glass bottle plants located in 30 states. These plants produce about 40 billion bottles a year for use in the beverage, chemical, cosmetics, dairy, drug and food industries.

The non returnable glass bottle for carbonated beverages wasn't developed until the 1950s. By the early 1970s, these bottles had become extremely popular.