Dating old bottles
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These features are pointed out - and much more readable - on the larger hyperlinked image; click to view. This unusual bottle without dating old ink bottles SkripWell is truly dating old ink custodes collectible. Basically its goose bumps on the bottle, and people love that. And almost everything good that was made in the West for Western businesses — the liquor dating old bottles, thewhatever — they used bottles made in the San Francisco Area although a lot of them were met in by train from the East Coast, too. Aqua glass typically dates from the late 19th century to the 1920s. They were tossed by some gold miner or whoever, someone who was servicing the gold mines in California. Another bottle also marked TRADE MARK, is a north bottle with no base marks. Many of the bottles we have listed are strictly for the ink bottle collector. Not sure on exact years used, but this name appears on paper or foil labels attached to tableware from the 1950s era.
Bill Lindsey discusses antique , including mouth blown bottles, , figurals, , , , and many other varieties. He also explains the history and methods of early bottle production, and how diggers find bottles. Based in Klamath Falls, Oregon, Lindsey can be reached through his website, , which is a member of our. My uncle was in Arizona, near some of the old mining camps there. Those were the glory days of bottle digging. People had access with four-wheel drive vehicles and gas was cheap and time-off was more abundant. Then years passed and people started really hitting the ghost towns and mining camps and logging camps of the West. Portland was the second biggest city on the coast, next to San Francisco in the mid to late 1800s, L. Seattle was just a stump town. And so we got in there and started finding really nice stuff. Bottle clubs got formed, magazines came out. I never looked back, and have been collecting ever since. Collectors Weekly: You must have a pretty big collection. Lindsey: I have over a thousand , which means something or nothing. Most of them are from the late 1700s to very early 1900s when they switched from hand-blown, mouth-blown bottles craft-type bottle production to machines. There was a glass blower with the mold boy producing them by hand — and they never touched it, of course, not literally. Michael Owens invented the machine in 1903, and it became more common by the 1908 or 1910. By 1915, probably half the bottles were made by machines. Machine-made bottles on average are worth much less and are much less interesting to collectors than are the earlier mouth-blown ones. The air from a glassblower was used to inflate and make the bottle versus a machine, which produced pressurized air. And almost everything good that was made in the West for Western businesses — the liquor companies, the , whatever — they used bottles made in the San Francisco Area although a lot of them were brought in by train from the East Coast, too. And those bottles date from right around the early 1860s when the first successful glass factory started in the Bay Area to the 1910, 1920 era when machines took over. Even after that point, people collect ACL, applied color labels, which are machine-made, and which are machine-made, the vast majority of them. I just collect everything. My Historic Bottle website, the reason it has so many pictures of all different types of bottles is that I just love all old bottles, from the to the to the to whatever, soda. I have a little of everything. Collectors Weekly: Do you specialize in anything? Lindsey: The only thing I really specialize in is medicinal tonic bottles. Tonic was a medicinal product. Spring tonic, some claimed it rejuvenated and invigorated, back then during the great age of quackery. Nobody seemed to collect tonic bottles much, so I just started collecting. I have 150 or 175 different ones and I know of over 400 that exist, ones embossed with the word tonic. Some categories are sexier than others, like the bitters bottles and the earlier historical and pictorial. Most bitters bottles date from the last half of the 19th century, the most collectible ones, and they come in the shapes of ears of corn, Indian maiden, fish, barrels as well as the square bottles. People have collected bitters for a long time. It was another genre of medicinal, but it was usually 30 to 40 percent alcohol. Most medicines had alcohol back then because that was the primary preservative, but it was also thought to have medicinal qualities — a belief somewhat supported by research today. That generated a critical mass of collector interest. Collectors Weekly: How many different types of bottles are there? Lindsey: I break them into eight different big categories on my Historic Bottle Website. From when they first started making in North America in the late 1700s to when machines took over, there were probably hundreds of thousands of uniquely different bottles made within a lot of different types. As an example of the variety of mouth-blown bottles, Ron Fowler in Seattle is doing a website just on one bottle type: the Hutchinson soda style, which was made from about 1880 to 1915. There are dozens of them from San Francisco. Pennsylvania has almost 2,000 different Hutchinson soda bottles alone! And color and age also help determine value or collector interest. It just looks like it. They just look like every other Hutchinson soda. An equivalent Portland one would be a 20-dollar bottle. Collectors Weekly: How much variation was there among mouth blown and machine made bottles? Lindsey: Earlier machine-made bottles have some variation because sometimes there are more bubbles in the glass or the machines were cruder in production. But the hand-blown ones used the same mold. Most hand-blown bottles were molded, not free-blown, which is blowing them without the aid of a mold. Each one was different because the color varied even through the same day. An aqua , later in the day when the glass batch oxidized more, might turn out deep blue-green or blue-aqua was a classic San Francisco glassworks thing. Or they had a leftover bunch of glass from the night before or earlier in the day and they end up starting another run of bottles for some other customer with the old glass. But one run of them, they blew in amber. For whatever reason, they blew only a few like that. That kind of variation is common in the bottle world. In the mouth blown days, there were a lot of companies, also called glass works. In San Francisco, you had the San Francisco Glass Works and the Pacific Glass Works. In 1876 they combined into the San Francisco and Pacific Glass Works and were in business until 1902. They glassblowers were essentially artists. From colonial times until the late 1800s, they were one of the highest paid craftsmen. It was a long apprentice process and it was hot, tough work. It was so hot, almost all of the mouth-blown factories shut down in the summer. Collectors Weekly: How long did it take to produce one mouth-blown bottle? Lindsey: I have this little film clip, an early black-and-white clip I got from an engineer of the Owens-Illinois Glass Company. It shows two guys and the mold boy — who opens and closes the mold and pulls the bottle out — producing. These guys are good. It probably dates right around 1900 to 1905. After the guy finishes blowing the bottle, the mold boy opens the mold and pulls out the bottle. Two guys getting two bottles a minute. Collectors Weekly: What are pontils, and why are collectors interested in them? I was working for the Bureau of Land Management. I was always helping them out — telling them how old a bottle was, what it was used for. So my website was nominally designed for archaeologists and others to be able to figure those things out. On the website, I break bottle identification into different parts. Everybody wants a pontil mark on the base of a bottle, it makes the bottle more valuable. A pontil mark is a little glass or iron deposit on the base of the bottle. It means the bottle was held with a pontil rod during the process of making it. After they blew the bottle, they took it out of the mold and fused this rod onto the base, so they could break the bottle off from the blowpipe — it allowed somebody to h old the hot bottle. They did this with all kinds of glass things, with early too, not just bottles. The pontil mark is a scar. There are three or four different basic types. One just leaves an iron deposit; others leave a chunk of sharp glass and can cut your finger even. In the early days, after bottle expansion, they would open the mold, and the bottle is pretty solidified by then. So they would take a rod or sometimes another extra blowpipe or something with a little chunk of hot melted glass on the base and fuse it to base of the bottle. Now the guy could hold it with the pontil rod. That was always the big bugaboo prior to the 20th century was how to seal bottles. Then they would lay the bottle over a little cradle or something and tap the rod and break it off from the base of the bottle. Otherwise it would break. Collectors Weekly: How many different types of bottle bases are there? Lindsey: There are three or four different major types of bases, and thousands of different looks to the base of the bottle, and several attributes that can tell you something about the bottle. My website was designed partly for archaeologists, who find bottle fragments too. The website describes what they look like, with illustrations. Almost all machine-made bottles were made in cup-based molds. During the free-blown era, when you pushed up the base of the , it gave strength to the base. One theory is that most bottles back then were either or wine bottles — the free-blown ones — and the kick-up would allow for the sediment in wine to collect in a little narrow area and pack down and be harder to pour out. Collectors Weekly: What about the bottle lips? There are cork lips, screw tops, crown tops, all different types of lips. For everything but , corks were used for sealing for hundreds of years. Corks were compressible, and could form themselves to irregular shapes. Collectors Weekly: Can you tell us more about the beginning of the bottle making process? It could be huge. They used what they call a snap tool, which is somewhat like the little tool people now use to pick up their dog poo. Instead of fusing this rod on to the base, they would just grab it by the base with a snap. Collectors Weekly: What about the embossing? Lindsey: That was done by engravers when the mold was formed, in reverse on the inside surface of the mold of course so that it looked right. One of the hardest letters to do in reverse is the N. So a lot of times, the older bottles particularly, have a reverse N or S. They would get it right most of the time, but not always. Actually San Francisco is famous for an engraver from about 1875 to 1885 of unknown name. No one knows who it was, but all the this guy did have an R embossed on it that has this distinctive flair, the way the curved leg sticks out on that R. The engraving was done with a chisel and a hammer, quite an art. Just forming the mold itself, especially the fancier designs of the figural shaped bottles, is tough enough. But then the mold engraver would come in afterwards and put the embossing or engraving inside the mold like the rings on the neck of the bottle, or the pedestal base. Some were just true artisans, their embossing is beautiful. You just think, how could they ever do this? I guess they penciled it out on the inside of the mold and then just carefully engraved into the surface of the mold. Collectors Weekly: So there was a different person for each job in the process? Then there was what they called the snapping up boy who worked the snap tool that grabbed the base of the bottle, or before that, the pontil rod. Then there was somebody who took the stuff to the lehr, the annealing place. But machines changed everything. One guy could run a machine, and it would produce 50 times the number of. I have a clip somewhere from the same Owens-Illinois engineer, showing a modern machine making over 600 bottles per minute. Basically the earliest Owens Automatic Bottle machines sat over a pot of glass and the machine would have a number of heads on it, anywhere from five or six on the early ones up to 12 or 15 or whatever. The machine would rotate around. And each head or section of the machine had two molds. There are different methods, but the Owens machine was the revolutionary one, invented first in 1903. The two-mold process was the real revolutionary part that made machines viable in the early 1900s. Collectors Weekly: Tell us more about some other types of collectible bottles. Some people collect nothing but free-blown early American stuff. But historically, the most popular and probably the priciest bottles are the and figured , which are really early American. Other ones pictured Jenny Lind, a Swedish singer. She was a big fad in the late 1850s, being brought over by P. And they made with her likeness on it. Most people call the figured flasks historical flasks. Collectors Weekly: And how far back do people collect? Lindsey: Bottles were produced in Roman times, 100 B. There was almost no change in the way bottles were made from back then until almost the mid 19th century. Through the Byzantine era, medieval times, the Renaissance, it was mostly free blowing, although they had some molds too. They would roll it around on a table or use paddles and different tools to form it. The earliest molds were like a hole on the floor or a block of wood that was just carved out. They would just drop the glass on the blowpipe down the hole, and when inflated it would form the squarish or roundish shape of the body. The rest above that, the shoulder, the neck and whatever were just produced by the skill of the craftsman. Most bottles that people collect are from about 1820 to 1910. Bottles were used for a lot of things back then. There were , and barber bottles, which are real decorative beautiful things from the late 1800s early 1900s. People could have their own bottle in a barbershop. They had their own hair tonic. There were bottles, little figural type things that had wide mouths with screw caps. Usually from the late 1800s or early 1900s, that had little, hard candies in them. They had them in the 20th century too. I remember them from when I was a kid. And there were all kinds of. It was just a fad or style. And they had what they call shop furniture, the big bottles with the glass stoppers that they would also use for bulk storage. And a lot of druggists would mix up their own concoctions of medicines, and these bottles contained their bulk supplies. Collectors Weekly: Were bottles not initially used for drinking liquids? In the 1500s, 1600s, almost all bottles then were or wine. Then they started perfecting methods for preserving foods, vacuum sealing and that kind of thing. It actually started with France, in the early 1800s. Napoleon offered a big reward to someone who would figure out how to preserve food. And this French guy invented the heating and sealing process where you kill the bacteria and then you vacuum seal it and got a big money prize. Glass were used for dried goods back to the 1400s to preserve meats and peaches, vegetables, what have you. Preservation before that meant drying, salting and soaking in alcohol, like the brandied cherries. I have some fruit jars. I find it a really fascinating field, unbelievable, all the different ways they tried to fix the age-old problem of preservation. It always boils down to the seal. It produces a vacuum. You put a lid on it with a rubber seal, like the Mason jar used, and you preserve it. Most bottle collectors also collect as a sidelight, but a lot of fruit jar collectors only collect fruit jars. A jar is really just a bottle with a wide mouth. Collectors Weekly: How were the different glass colors for bottles produced? Lindsey: Glass is basically just lime and silica and soda ash, with different additions for the colors. For cobalt blue, you put cobalt in the glass batch. Ruby red glass is produced with either a lot of selenium or gold. Typically the standard mixes had iron and other impurities in it, and iron tends to make green. Amber I think you get with selenium or by throwing wood chips in it. Milk glass is produced with fluorspar or zinc oxide. People would want certain colors for certain types of bottles. Most are brown because it protects the beer. Amber filters out the light waves that turn beer skunky. Most bottles, like aqua medicine bottles, were that color because it was the cheapest glass to make. A lot of bottles, like wine bottles, are in darker colors, which hide sediment. Some bottles like , cost was less of a factor because they used them over and over. I guess it was just a way to attract customers. Another great type of bottle is the umbrella. They first started making them about 1830 or so and made them up through the 1800s. The blue ones tend to be a thousand bucks or more. There are some rare ones like puce, plum purple and stuff like that that are worth up to a couple thousand. Again, color is king. Collectors Weekly: What about the figurals? There are lots of them around because people kept them, since they were neat-looking even to the original buyers back in 1870. It was an early marketing thing to attract the eye. Figural were used for all kinds of different things. Barrel shapes were common, but ones like a pitcher with a handle, cabin shapes were common with bitters and liquor bottles. There are tens of thousands of them around now. The thing with liquor bottles, everything ended with Prohibition, which happened to be in 1919, right at the end when machines finally took over from mouth-blown production. There was some liquor made during Prohibition, and of course moonshine, but they just reused other bottles. The early patent medicine producers were some of the earliest , with and and the bottles themselves. People are just fascinated with glass, I think. Bottles are pretty simple relative to say, , with all the layers of glass and different colors mixed in. Some of the most valuable are Western bottles, as far as selling prices. The attractive thing about Western bottles is the connection with the Pioneer Era, the Gold Rush Era, especially California, the mining boom, the Indian Wars, the history. The West just fascinates the world. Back in the 1870s, there were 50 people in the east for every one out west. In fact they found one in downtown San Francisco about 10 years ago, it was the third known example. They called it the great San Francisco dig of 1998, I think. Bottles were a fairly cherished commodity. Color is king in bottles. The aqua version of these would sell for a few hundred. And a lot of times you can get a run of a certain flask or even in many different colors. I have an assortment of barrel bitters, although I got rid of my green ones, in several different colors. Probably the best bottle show in the West is the first weekend of December in Auburn, just near Sacramento. To me, bottle collecting was always appealing because we used to find them ourselves, just like treasure hunting. There are still people who dig Oakland and Alameda and the areas around the Bay Area there. There are also people I still think are poking around the mud where the various ferries used to put in. Years ago they used to find a lot of there, that were thrown out in the 1850s and 60s. Early stuff for California. You get stains in bottle digging too. Most of the time its the reaction of the hard water and the lime in the glass, and will turn it whitish. Occasionally you get ones where the reaction is a more iridescent color. They like crude bottles that were made crudely. They have lapidary type machines, the ones people polish rocks with. Many collectors love imperfections in crude. They add to the character and personality, the whittle marks, the bubbles in the glass, the lines, the twists. The bubbles were a function of how they mixed the glass, where they drew the glass off. The bubbles are like the bubbles in sink water — they typically rise to the top. Basically its goose bumps on the bottle, and people love that. Glassmakers got paid by the number of bottles they had produced, so the faster the better. So a lot of the crudeness came just from doing it fast. When the machines came around, it took all the craftsmanship out of bottle making, including the bad craftsmanship of crude. There are some variations however. Colors will vary depending on how they mixed it up. But by the 1930s, you hold two bottles together from the same mold, and they pretty much look identical. There are very few irregularities, the stretch marks, all that stuff that some early machine bottles do have. But as soon as they started using machines, the individuality of each bottle diminished quite a bit compared to the mouth-blown days. Collectors Weekly: Who were some of the big bottle manufacturers? Lindsey: Owens-Illinois Glass Company was a biggie from 1929 when they were formed, but their predecessors were the Owens Bottle Company and the Illinois Glass Company, which goes back to the 1870s. Owens-Illinois is, of course, still going. The biggie on the West Coast was the San Francisco and Pacific Glass Works. Some of the big ones back east were Whitney Glass Works, in New Jersey, and Whittall Tatum, which made most of the bottles from the 1870s or 1920s. In New England, a lot of the little towns back in the first half of the 19th century were the big producers, until they ran out of wood to fire the furnaces. Gradually, bottle making moved to Ohio and western Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh was a huge area for bottle making, and glassmaking in general. From the 1820s to late 1800s, Zanesville, Ohio produced all kinds of. Toulouse did a book years ago, Bottle Makers and Their Marks. He was an engineer at Owens-Illinois. I would guess there were 30 to 50 manufacturers back east in the 19th century to early 20th century, for every one there was out west. There was one in Denver. There was one in Seattle in the early 1900s, that only lasted a few years. The ones that made it were the ones around the Bay Area. Collectors Weekly: Did any of the manufacturers produce catalogs? I scanned the whole thing. It shows you all the standard shapes they offered. Most people would buy the standard shapes, but a lot of people would just want like the figural. But the stock designs were cheaper. The catalog shows stock bottles — all mouth-blown. Actually, this catalog does have some machine-made bottles right at the end. They got the machine in 1905 and they were just starting to produce some bottles. They were the biggest bottle-making company in the U. They disseminated a lot of them, and of course the catalogs themselves are highly collectible and tend to be expensive. It has everything, all kinds of druggist bottles, , food bottles, toiletries, colognes, bitters. Collectors Weekly: Can you tell where a bottle was made by just looking at it? All the figured , and almost all of the figural were made back east. So a bottle that says Portland Soda Works, Portland, Oregon, was almost certainly made in San Francisco because that was the closest although there were some bottles made in Pennsylvania that were shipped out here. So they shipped them, probably by train, maybe it was cheaper? Collectors Weekly: Are most bottles marked? But that died out a bit after the middle of the 19th century. Then when you get into the early 1900s and particularly by the 1930s, almost all bottles have some mark on them that tells who made it. But I know of nothing where the mark of the person who actually made it, its glassblower, is indicated. Collectors Weekly: Who collects bottles? Have you noticed any big trends in bottle collecting? There have been cycles where certain bottle categories or types are booming and then crash. When eBay came of age, that was a big boom for bottle collecting, but it crashed with the tech crash. The good ones stayed up. A lot of the mundane bottles tanked in value. Western bottles in particular have become much more popular in the last 10 to 15 years. Most of the bottles on that Historic Bottle Website are mine. I go to the Auburn one, and the ones that are closer, like Chico and sometimes the one over in southwest Oregon, Canyonville, and Reno and Las Vegas. Collectors Weekly: Do you have any books that you can suggest? So those three, for sure. Most bottle-specific research has been done by collectors, not archaeologists. The good books that deal with the history of companies that used bottles, have virtually all been done by collectors who just love the topic. Collectors Weekly: Where do diggers tend to find bottles? How did people dispose of them? Lindsey: Bottles are found by diggers in three or four primary places. One is outhouse holes. People would just throw them down in the outhouse and then when it was full, dig another pit next door and move the outhouse over. When they put water systems in cities in the late 1800s, they filled their wells up with garbage. So those were always great places to dig. You get out in the countryside around mining camps, they would throw in ravines, or just toss them out on the ground to be covered by pine needles or whatever or trampled by livestock. People threw them all over. Sometimes they had a tent or a little camp and would throw a few more out because they were there a while. It takes a little sleuthing to find where the outhouses and trash pits were. Almost always, they wanted to put them as far away from the house as possible, in the back ends of the lots, in the corners. Sometimes there will be three or four because they moved it after a time. Diggers use what they call Sanborn insurance maps. Back in the 1800s and into the mid 1900s, this company would produce these to-scale maps for local insurance companies. They now have them all on microfilm, and for a price you can get all the information for just about any town, from at least the 1870s in the West — and I think 1860s back East — up until the mid 1900s. I actually have one of the original books form Portland, Oregon, published in 1889. They updated it with layers they glued on top as things changed — in the case of my book up until 1898. We could then measure back to those corners and probe for the soft spots, essentially, which could be an outhouse or an old well. It was a lot of fun. They were the best times of my life. I wish I could do it now. Even back then, the had value. But also the history, in that we would find this bottle was used by somebody in 1870 who tossed it. For example, the early Gold Rush soda bottles were all from Sacramento or San Francisco. They were made back east — because there was no glass company in the 1850s on the West Coast — and they were put on sailing ships and went around the horn to San Francisco, to be filled with soda water. Somebody would buy it, use it, and throw it away. I just find that phenomenal! So I have 12 or 15 different Gold Rush Era soda bottles from San Francisco, and Sacramento. I just look at those things and I know they came around on a sailing ship. They were tossed by some gold miner or whoever, someone who was servicing the gold mines in California. A lot of those early San Francisco are plate molds. The iron plate on the front of the mold was replaceable so they would just engrave the plate, take out whatever plate was in the mold prior, put this new plate in there and they could blow a bottle for that purchaser, in this case soda, the Sacramento soda bottler. The bottles are otherwise identical except for the plate embossing. They did that with bottles, , all kinds of things. About 1845 or 1850, the first soda bottles with plates show up, and then druggist bottles, almost all of those are plate molds. Back then it cost upwards of a hundred bucks or more to have a private mold made. But you could have a plate made for a couple of dollars. They were highly successful with prescription bottles for about 50 years — they dominated the market. Collectors Weekly: Are those plates collectible? Do you find them ever? Lindsey: As a curiosity, yes. I got the two I have off eBay. Dominion Glass Company in Ontario, right at the start of World War II had this huge pile of molds left over from as early as the late 1800s. They melted them all down for the war effort. Images in this article appear in the following order: All images courtesy Bill Lindsey and 1. Example of liquor bottles 3. Rye Whiskey liquor bottle 4. Lactopeptine medicinal bottle 5. Benedictine liquor bottle 8. Wide mouth food storage bottle 11. Plantation bitters bottle 12. Ball Ideal fruit jar 13. It has the number 18 then the letter B inside of a circle then number 3. The letter B is in the center of the 18 and the 3 and the circle is only around the B. The shape of the bottle is trapezium or at least the bottom of the bottle has that type of shape in my opinion. Leave a Comment or Ask a Question If you want to identify an item, try posting it in. Your name required Your email will not be published required Your comment.
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