Closures for bottles have been around for as long as bottles themselves. Straw, clay, and leather were some of the earliest bottle stoppers. In the early 18th century, a Benedictine monk named Dom Perignon is thought to have been one of the first to use cork to cap bottles—in his case, he was trying to keep the bubbles in bottles of Champagne. In fact, corks were widely used as bottle stoppers until the early part of the 20th century, when the mass-production of bottles for everything from soda water to soda pop was common. What we know today as the bottle cap was invented in 1892 by William Painter, a Baltimore inventor of Irish descent who gave the world not only the bottle cap but the bottle opener to pry the cap safely from the top of a bottle. Today, Painter's crown cap and opener seem like they would have brought the race to make the perfect bottle stopper to an abrupt halt, but numerous other sealing devices were widely used by bottlers even after 1892. For non-carbonated beverages, corks in bottle tops were often sealed with foil. Because of the pressure inside bottles of carbonated beverages, corks sealing bottles of soda were topped with a piece of wire using what was known as a Lightning closure. Threads on the insides or outsides of vintage bottles were also designed to be paired with threaded metal or hard-rubber closures. Although bottles with outside threads ruled the day, bottles with internal threads were plenty prevalent. But inside-threaded bottles relied on hard-rubber stoppers to make a seal. Outside-threaded bottles could be sealed with more reliable metal screw-caps, a technology that is still widely used today. Beyond threaded bottles, there were also multiple variations of Lightning (also known as toggle or swing) closures, whose lids were made of metal or even porcelain that was pushed down by the closure's metal bail onto a rubber gasket to seal the bottle. Many beer bottles were sealed with Lightning closures, as were Ball and other fruit and canning jars. Painter's crown cap, though, represented the future of the industry. Indeed, other inventors tried to get in on the action. There was the Goldy, invented in 1897, and the Kork-N-Seal cap, patented in 1906. But the crown cap prevailed due to its simplicity. Made of metal and lined with cork, linoleum, and eventually plastic, the Crown Cork Cap, as it was marketed, is noteworthy for its corrugated flange fringe, which, when mechanically depressed around the rim of a bottle, seals it tight. Bottle manufacturers such as Illinois Glass Co. made the crown cap even more useful by redesigning their bottles expressly for these caps. But the cap changed, too; in the 1960s, the number of flanges on the typical crown cap dropped from 24 to 21. The tops of these caps, of course, are what lure most collectors to the world of vintage bottle caps. Emblazoned with words like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Orange Crush, Dr. Pepper, and 7Up, crown caps are inexpensive to collect and take up very little space, making them easy to own, too. They are also tiny and charming examples of advertising art—the bare leg on a vintage Nehi cap comes to mind.