Amethyst colored whiskey flask

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gdog68

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Found this in the river when I first started bottle hunting. Very crude lip, has dirt or sand stuck in the glass. Has some chips here and there but no major cracks. Smooth base and my guess would be 1870s 1880s. Any thoughts on rarity based on color?
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willong

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Found this in the river when I first started bottle hunting. Very crude lip, has dirt or sand stuck in the glass. Has some chips here and there but no major cracks. Smooth base and my guess would be 1870s 1880s. Any thoughts on rarity based on color?
That's a nice shoo-fly flask. Please don't think that I am denigrating your find when I reply that it is not as old as you think, nor is that light amethyst color rare.

Your bottle has a tooled lip, but not an applied one. It was most likely produced in late 1890's to 1910 era.

The bottle was originally made colorless through the addition of manganese to the glass batch materials. It lay exposed to sunlight somewhere and for some time before you found it; long enough for the UV component of sunlight to react with the manganese and produce the amethyst hue. Prior to World War One, when glass makers substituted selenium for manganese due to the latter element's wartime strategic status, manganese was commonly used to produce colorless glass. Any colorless glass of the era will react with ionizing radiation to produce the color change.

Personally, I would value that bottle as a first find at least as much as I do my own first antique bottle, an amber turn-mold whiskey quart cylinder that was produced in approximately the same era. Indeed, I find the random pattern etched into your flask's glass from what I presume was time spent in an acidic environment to be quite interesting. That bottle had quite an adventure!
 

UnderMiner

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The purple coloration indicates it has been exposed to the surface and sunlight. The longer the sun shines on it the darker it will become. Some people purposfully expose these bottles to high intensity UV rays (like in tanning beds) to induce a deeper shade artificially in a short period of time. Simply leaving the bottle in a sunny spot by the window will have the same effect but it will take many many years.
 

gdog68

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That's a nice shoo-fly flask. Please don't think that I am denigrating your find when I reply that it is not as old as you think, nor is that light amethyst color rare.

Your bottle has a tooled lip, but not an applied one. It was most likely produced in late 1890's to 1910 era.

The bottle was originally made colorless through the addition of manganese to the glass batch materials. It lay exposed to sunlight somewhere and for some time before you found it; long enough for the UV component of sunlight to react with the manganese and produce the amethyst hue. Prior to World War One, when glass makers substituted selenium for manganese due to the latter element's wartime strategic status, manganese was commonly used to produce colorless glass. Any colorless glass of the era will react with ionizing radiation to produce the color change.

Personally, I would value that bottle as a first find at least as much as I do my own first antique bottle, an amber turn-mold whiskey quart cylinder that was produced in approximately the same era. Indeed, I find the random pattern etched into your flask's glass from what I presume was time spent in an acidic environment to be quite interesting. That bottle had quite an adventure!
1890s to 1920s would fit in with the time frame of the dump site in the river. The seams of the bottle stops at the lip not before, I don't know if that determines if that is applied as in glass added or finished with a tool? Also you mentioned acidic environment, the river itself has had tons of chemicals and farm fertilizers dumbed into it for many years and most all of the blob top beers and other bottles I find at this location all have that same etching on them.
 

willong

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1890s to 1920s would fit in with the time frame of the dump site in the river. The seams of the bottle stops at the lip not before, I don't know if that determines if that is applied as in glass added or finished with a tool? Also you mentioned acidic environment, the river itself has had tons of chemicals and farm fertilizers dumbed into it for many years and most all of the blob top beers and other bottles I find at this location all have that same etching on them.
In your photo, it appears to me that the mold seam terminates at the lower edge of the first ring of the lip, though I am perhaps not seeing clearly enough? I cannot discern mold seam marks above that location.

It also looks like traces of annular striations (turning marks) are present on the lip above that point; do you see the same?

There is a wealth of information at the Society for Historical Archeology (SHA) website. For those of us interested in mouth-blown, hand-finished bottles, but not likely to encounter free-blown or empontiled examples, the section on finishes is one of the most useful diagnostic tools available.

It is well worth perusing and bookmarking the following for future reference: https://sha.org/bottle/finishstyles.htm
 

sandchip

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Color, age, and manufacture already having been adequately covered, I will add that it's a great example of a common flask. Goes to show how character is just as important as condition in antique bottles, taking what is usually a somewhat boring bottle to another level. Nice find.
 

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