Can anyone tell me what product was in this bottle and teach me about how it was made

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Mikez

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I think he meant **** on the bottom see that isn't so bad!! lol. yes shoe blacking or polish is what came in your little bottle. It was blown into a "snap case mold" so the top ring could be added or tooled, any time side mold marks do not go to the top of a bottle, means it was applied or tooled top, pre about 1885-90. the snap case mold made pontils obsolete in about 1865 or so, depending on the glasshouse making the bottle. ( the glasshouses used different technologies often and only the big ones were on the leading edge of breaking new techniques) some glasshouse were making pontiled bottle into the 1870s. your bottles color is called aqua and is the second most common color after clear or flint glass. Touluse wrote a good book about bottle-glassmaking, it is out of print, but you can find them on e-bay and some bottle auction sites. it is rare and will cost yu a bunch, but worth it for the info given.......Andy

Thanks! Just the kind of information I was looking for.
 

andy volkerts

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Your welcome, Your bottles basic making ingrediants are soda ash, silica sand, salt, cullet (broken pieces of old glass) lime, and sometimes a bit of arsenic in each batch. from (whitney glass works formulae entry) old line glasshouse and now out of business. mostly the cullet was of the same color that the batch is, but occasionally some other color cullet would get in a batch and cause the bottles made in that batch to be a different color then was intended, (to the delight of us bottle collectors I might add :)....also somebody may have thrown a wrong chemical into the batch, such cobalt, which makes blue glass.
 

Mikez

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Thanks Andy that's good stuff.
So you do think it was Whitney? Does that give any clues to the brand of shoe polish?
I love to know the product so I can look up advertising. Gives me a connection to the past.

Do you think the extra thick glass (wherein lies much of the beauty) is to protect against breaking and causing a nasty mess with the toxic black content?
 

andy volkerts

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Could be Whitney glassworks, and it could be just about any glassworks, as shoe polish was a common product and all the glasshouses made polish bottles at one time or another. Its just to unknowable to make a call. No I think the extra thick glass is just an anomally that happened during the gathering and blowing process. I have seen a series of glass bottles that were all the same style and for the same use (soda water) that were made at the San Francisco glassworks in the 1870s. There were thirty of the same style and brand, and not two of them were alike not only in color, but height, weight, embossing lettering, and crudeness varied wildly. so it was just what happened in the days before mass production started to make everything exactly the same. which is why some collectors will decide to collect all variants of a certain brand of bottle. Ferdinand Meyer, President of the FOHBC has a color run of Drakes bitters that must number twenty different colors, and they are all the way from neatly made , to crude as all get out. oh! the possibilities of bottle collecting are very vast, so enjoy our hobby, it is one of the most fascinating known to man!!
 

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