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American National Biography Online Houghton, Amory (27 July 1899-21 Feb. 1981), business executive, was born in Corning, New York, the son of Alanson Bigelow Houghton, a glassworks manager, and Adelaide Louise Wellington. After he graduated from Harvard University in 1921, Houghton married Laura DeKay Richardson of Providence, Rhode Island, with whom he had five children. In the year of his marriage, Houghton became a fourth-generation glassmaker, joining the staff of his family's firm, Corning Glass Works. Houghton inherited a family tradition of glassmaking rooted in flexible production and a loosely defined canon of "science." Houghton's great-grandfather, the first Amory Houghton, founded the glassworking dynasty by operating a series of factories in Somerville, Massachusetts, and Brooklyn, New York, starting in 1851. In 1868 the patriarch and his sons, anxious to free themselves of union labor, moved to Corning in upstate New York, where citizens were seeking industrial development. After a series of failures, Corning Glass Works passed into the hands of Amory Houghton, Jr., and his brother, Charles F. Houghton, who built a portfolio of clients among the nation's railroads and electrical manufacturers. While contemporaries clung to rule-of-thumb methods, the Houghtons experimented with new batch formulas and product designs, consulting with research scientists on a job-by-job basis to establish important university ties. The next generation, Alanson B. and Arthur A. Houghton, continued to pursue a mixed-output product strategy and added professional scientists to their staff, diversifying into consumer, automobile, and laboratory markets after the development of thermally and mechanically stable glasses--including Pyrex-brand glassware--by factory scientists before World War I. Following family custom, Houghton spent his early career at Corning Glass Works in a series of hands-on jobs in manufacturing and sales before assuming executive positions. Throughout the 1920s, Houghton worked under the company's attorney-turned-president, Alexander D. Falck, a creative manager who pioneered joint ventures, widely licensed the firm's patents, nurtured the invention of continuous-flow glassmaking equipment, and strengthened the company's commitment to science. When elected president in 1930, Houghton assumed leadership of a sound firm that fused batch and quantity production methods to make a spectrum of products for diverse markets, from household to electrical glassware. Houghton's tenure as president coincided with the Great Depression and the early years of World War II, which constituted an era of expansion and modernization for Corning. The glassworks was the world's largest manufacturer of envelopes and filament tubing for light bulbs, and making huge quantities of products for electrical manufacturers kept the firm in the black during the depression. Depending on this lucrative business for profits, Houghton built on the traditions pioneered by his forebears to make Corning a world leader in glassmaking science while fostering the development of still more automatic manufacturing processes. The firm's research-based accomplishments in high-temperature glasses--borosilicate, aluminosilicate, and silica glasses--convinced Houghton that laboratory work would yield knowledge essential to successful product and process innovation. He called his investment in research "patient money." During the late 1930s he opened a large research and development facility staffed by professional scientists and modeled after laboratories in leading science-based industries. Symbolic of Houghton's commitment to science at large, Corning cast the world's largest telescope mirror from Pyrex-brand glassware--the 200-inch blank for the Mount Palomar telescope--in 1934. As president, Houghton also broadened Corning's portfolio of equity ventures to increase the firm's share of markets for "high-technology" products. In 1937 Houghton formed the Pittsburgh Corning Corporation with the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company to make and sell architectural blocks, and in 1938 he created the Owens Corning Fiberglass Corporation with the Owens-Illinois Glass Company for the production and distribution of fiberglass products. In 1943 Corning entered a joint venture with the Dow Chemical Company, the Dow Corning Corporation, to develop silicones created under Houghton's direction in the early 1930s. In these joint ventures Corning provided technical know-how, while partners contributed marketing expertise. These equity ventures were models for similar endeavors developed by subsequent generations of managers at Corning. During World War II Houghton undertook a series of government appointments, acting as a liaison between American manufacturers and federal agencies. As a "dollar-a-year man," Houghton held executive positions in the Office of Production Management and the War Production Board. Houghton's wartime career was short-lived, for he withdrew from government service in the light of publicity surrounding an antitrust suit against the Hartford-Empire Company, a manufacturer of glassmaking equipment partially owned by his family. From 1943 to 1945 Houghton returned to war work when President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him deputy chief of the U.S. Mission for Economic Affairs in London; from this position, Houghton coordinated shipments of American materiel to Great Britain and Allied fronts. Years of executive experience combined with government service groomed Houghton for diplomacy, and he was U.S. ambassador to France from 1957 to 1961. During Houghton's first fifty years at Corning, the firm witnessed tremendous growth from a two-factory operation with 2,500 employees in 1921 to a seventy-plant operation with more than 25,000 employees throughout the world in 1971. Houghton's executive accomplishments include expansion of Corning's research and development facilities, the founding of important joint ventures, the broadening of overseas interests, and key product innovations, from fiberglass to silicones. Houghton served Corning Glass Works as a director (1928-1941), executive vice president (1928-1930), president (1930-1941), chairman of the board (1941-1961), chairman of the executive committee (1961-1964), honorary chairman (1964-1971), and chairman emeritus (1971-1981). After his retirement as president, he continued to influence decision making at Corning through a forceful personality that shaped the ideas and actions of family members under his tutelage. His accomplishments as chairman included the construction of Corning Glass Center, an educational center devoted to the science and technology of glassmaking, and the founding of the Corning Museum of Glass, an institution dedicated to collecting and preserving historical glass artifacts. His many philanthropic interests included the Boy Scouts of America, while his belief in higher education materialized as gifts to numerous institutions, from Corning Community College to Harvard University. Houghton died in Charleston, South Carolina. Bibliography The main repository for primary sources relating to Houghton is the Department of Archives and Records Management, Corning Incorporated, Corning, N.Y. Corning's extensive holdings include business records and family papers that illuminate the life and work of members of the Houghton family. For the firm's operations from 1868 to 1965 with reference to early research activities and consumer products, see Regina Lee Blaszczyk, "Imagining Consumers: Manufacturers and Markets in Ceramics and Glass, 1865-1965" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Delaware, 1995). Regina Lee Blaszczyk Citation: Regina Lee Blaszczyk. "Houghton, Amory"; http://www.anb.org/articles/10/10-02078.html; American National Biography Online Feb. 2000. Access Date: Copyright (c) 2000 American Council of Learned Societies. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. From American National Biography, published by Oxford University Press, Inc., copyright 2000 American Council of Learned Societies. Further information is available at http://www.anb.org.
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