Posted 8 years ago
FlashBall
(1 item)
Don't know much about these bottles. Would like to learn more. I guess you could call this my Kickstart into bottle collecting. Marking the purple one as an "unsolved mystery" haven't learned what it is just yet. Does anyone have an idea?
Welcome! I collect soda bottles also and those are a good start for a soda collector. They are all common ones but still nice. They all appear to be from the 70's except the RC Cola's, they might be from the 60's. Look on the bottoms of the bottles for date codes. The one on the far right looks like some kind of whiskey bottle.
There are no marks on the purple one. Besides the 18 flat ridges at the bottom. Do those have flat areas have a name?
I am not sure if there is a 'name' for those. Or just the style of bottle that co. chose.
Purple looks like a whiskey bottle. Do the seams go up to the top?
Yes, they are very faint but you can see the seams go up all the way.
If the seams go all the way up to the top and do not stop on the mouth or neck, the bottle dates from the 1900s. It would likely date after 1915, as that's when fully machine-made bottles began to take off. Yours must be a very early machine-made bottle. It looks from the photos to be hand-tooled, though.
Before machines took over, the top was finished by using a special tool. It was done by hand then. Machines began blowing bottles and eventually were able to finish the tops, thus replacing the number of people needed to make a bottle.
Your bottle is purply because of Manganese in the glass, which, when hit by the sun's radiation, will over time turn pink/purple.
Manganese was replaced when WW1 neared an end. Our supplies came from Europe but had been closed off. It was originally used to make the bottles clear.
Our supply for glass making ran out about 1920, so sun-purpled bottles aren't seen much after that.
Darker purple bottles are artificially irradiated, so watch out for those. They're passed off as natural or rare colours, when really someone used a hospital-grade steriliser to irradiate them.
Your bottle is stained white with ground/water minerals because it was dug or found in water at some point. No amount of scrubbing or acids will clean it out. It can be removed by tumbling in a bottle tumbling machine, or it can be temporarily hidden with baby oil.