An Early 1900's Cruet?

[ladychesterfield]

Hello Everyone!

A friend told me about your forums and said that I might just find out something about my little bottle .. With a little coaxing?

Hope that it is okay to show more than one picture because I really don't know what parts you need to view.

This is an old cruet shaped bottle that shows no evidence that it was ever made to hold a stopper?

The better-half dug it up here in Virginia and I almost threw it away.

My pictures leave a lot to be desired so I'll just tell you that the thing is 7 and 3 quarters high and 3 and a half inches at the base.

There are 12 'swirled' ribs that can be felt inside and out.

The pontil as I discovered is what is known as
a combination pontil. (iron pontil under a glass pontil)

There is a pretty greenish blue iridescence under proper lighting and it is just .. entirely filled with bubbles including the solid and applied handle!

The bottom is 'pushed up' into the bottle itself.

I guess that my main question is: What is this? *-)

Thank You

Bren

 

[ladychesterfield]

I know that my pictures are horrible!

If you need better ones, I can take some ... in a few more hours, outdoors with proper lighting.

Bren

 

[brwvabell]

Here are some clearer pictures.

Sorry about those image /image relics, Can't figure out how to get rid of them.

Bren

 

[RED Matthews]

The pontil as I discovered is what is known as
a combination pontil. (iron pontil under a glass pontil)

Well Bren, [ladychesterfield] I was impressed with you pontil descrioption. I would like to know where you got it from. I try to keep up with any reference to the marks made on a glass product before 1900.

Your glass bottle would be really hard to date, regarding when it was made. It is obviously a hand made product. Seeing the second set of pictures, it looks to me like the glass gather was blown into a ten (or 12 - like you counted) ribs, dip mold to develop the pattern around the base and stretched to make the ribs up the container. The bottle having been made in this manner would have had an iron blowpipe for the making process. The pontil looks to me like it could have been created by the use of the blowpipe from the previous similar bottle blowpipe. The gaffer or bottle makers assistant would have placed that blowpipe on a rack by the glory hole of the furnace to keep the glass end hot enough to be stuck on the next product piece. So when your bottle was to be empontilled that blowpipe would have been applied to the bottom of the one you ended up with. At that point the bottom would have been pushed-up to keep the pontil glass from marring the table where the finished bottle would come to rest.
At that point the previous blowpipe became the handling devise for the bottle maker and he would have cut his blow pipe off and taken the empontilled new bottle to his chair-railed table and rolled it to cool some and no doubt flared the top finish to suit what I see.
The next action would have been to apply the glass pulled gather that became the applied handle. This handle looks like it was applied first at the top, pulled to give it the tapered reduction of diameter and shaped to the the bottom application of the handle.
From there the glass handler would use a handling fork to take the glass item when it was cracked off the older blow pipe handle. The handling boy would then put the glass product in the annealing oven, where it would be held at a suitable temperature as the shops other containers were made. The annealing furnace would be gradually cooled to room temperature. This annealing is necessary to reduce cords of internal stress that were created in the manipulation of the hot pliable metal as the product was being formed. If it were not annealed it would end up breaking from that internal tension and stress in the product.
There again it is my typical TMI, but it explains the obvious creation technique as best I can see it. RED Matthews

 

[cc6pack]

Red

It came from Bill Lindsey's site.

 

[brwvabell]

Thank You for looking at my cruet.

I am not sure if it was Bill Lindsey's site or not but it is very informative and I sure do appreciate the time he must have taken to create it!

Here is the page that I found out about the pontil. http://www.sha.org/bottle/pontil_scars.htm#Combination%20Pontil

Bren

 

[brwvabell]

WOW

I just went and looked .. It is Bill Lindsey's site!

Mr Lindsey .. If you are a member of this forum .. I'd like to "Thank You" for a fantastic web site!

Bren

 

[brwvabell]

Mr Matthews

It is a lot for me to take in but after reading your post again .. all I can say is .. You REALLY know your stuff! lol

I can't tell you how much I appreciate your knowledge.

Would you mind if I were to copy and paste 'some' of your post to a forum that I am a member of?

I promised them that if I found out any information on this bottle, I would let them know.

Again, Thank You so much!

Bren

 

[RED Matthews]

Well; hello brwvabell and the others. I got in a little trouble last night because I didn't get to bed on time, because I was reviewing your cruet and it's making sequence just kept on flowing until I got it finished. I appreciate the response.
I have over twenty blogs in process for my homepage, all on subjects that really need some description coverage to help the bottle people that are so busy digging that they don't have time to absorb everything by reading books about glass making. Unfortunately there is a lot of information that didn't get described because an early bottle maker had to keep his how-to-do-it secrets to himself and his shop of men and boys that were his team of doers.
I have a list of a few books in a blog on my homepage that are really worth finding and reading. But I have had the great experience of traveling many parts of the world to visit glass factories, and you would be surprised at some of the old methods that were still being used. Over seventy years of collecting and studying - that is how it happened. Since retirement I have obtained about 60+ books on glass and read a lot of them completely and one in particular I read three times.

Regarding your interest in putting my writings on a different forum - I guess I don't care but I would like to know about other forums on the subject. Get back to me about it.
RED Matthews