Help with Hobbleskirt ID

[SODABOB]

Speaking of bottle machines, I'm seeing some indicators that my ice blue bottle might have been machine made and not hand blown. You may recall my discussing this earlier where I mentioned the perfect circle on the base. According to various sources the circle may be what is often referred to as a valve mark. Apparently, it is only found on machine made bottles. Even though my bottle has a lot of bubbles and offset seams that are typical of blown bottles, the circle on the base seems to be evidence that it was machine made. Apparently, hand blown bottles would never have that characteristic. Even though I'm ok with that, it adds a little more clarity and/or mystery about blown bottles verses machine bottles. The circle on my bottle measures about 1 inch in diameter - which is about 25 millimeters.

Bob

 

[bottle-o-pop]

Thank you for that information, Bob! I was looking at some of my bottles a couple days ago and saw a mark like that valve mark. It looks exactly the same except its diameter is only 14mm.
The bottle is labeled Frank Banko from Bethlehem, PA.

 

[SODABOB]

Thanks, bop - is your bottle a Coca Cola bottle? If possible, can you share a photo of the bottle and one of the base?

Bob

 

[hemihampton]

Leon

The first hobble-skirts were made on a Johnny Bull semi-automatic bottle machine. The front cover of the Dean book shows Earl standing in front of one which also shows a Coca Cola mold. I don't know the whole story about the Johnny Bull other than it was a nickname for the H.M. Ashley machine that was patented in England in the 1800s. There are numerous patents related to it and it was improved on many times. Apparently, Graham Glass also used them, and it was the basis for their own patented machines that I posted links to yesterday. Johnny Bull was the name of some type of folk hero in England. The apparent connection between Johnny Bull and the bottle machine is that they were both considered as reliable. I attached several articles that discuss the Johnny Bull.

Bob

Interesting, Thanks. Leon.

 

[CanadianBottles]

Speaking of bottle machines, I'm seeing some indicators that my ice blue bottle might have been machine made and not hand blown. You may recall my discussing this earlier where I mentioned the perfect circle on the base. According to various sources the circle may be what is often referred to as a valve mark. Apparently, it is only found on machine made bottles. Even though my bottle has a lot of bubbles and offset seams that are typical of blown bottles, the circle on the base seems to be evidence that it was machine made. Apparently, hand blown bottles would never have that characteristic. Even though I'm ok with that, it adds a little more clarity and/or mystery about blown bottles verses machine bottles. The circle on my bottle measures about 1 inch in diameter - which is about 25 millimeters.

Bob

Yes your bottle is 100% machine-made, but I don't think it was made on an Owens machine. Some other sort of early machine from the looks of it. But a BIM bottle would never have a seam going to the top of the lip, even if it's offset from the other seams on the bottle. Note also the faint semicircle on the base in the lower left corner, that's also a dead giveaway that a bottle was made on some sort of machine. Early machine-made bottles, especially on types of machines other than the Owens machine, could have glass which was just as bubbly if not more than BIM bottles of the era. You see this a lot with European bottles of that era where the Owens machine didn't quickly become ubiquitous like it did in North America.

An applied lip will have more of a gloopy seam around the area where the lip meets the neck, showing that it was obviously stuck on while the glass was still hot, and an applied top will never have a vertical seam on it. The base of the lip should be kind of folded down over the neck. Applied crowns are very unusual in the US, I pretty much only ever see them on UK bottles. This is an example of an actual applied crown:

 

[SODABOB]

Thanks, CB

I agree - machine made. And likely the vast majority of early hobble-skirts were machine made - including my Root 17 (1917) bottle. Graham was using machines as early as 1913 - which is two years before the hobble-skirt was patented.

Here are a couple of more things for everyone to ponder ...

Because Graham Glass had a tendency to use complicated codes on their bottles (letters - numbers) I wonder why they used 576 on their hobble-skirts? If we consider the numbers from an alphabetical sense, we come up with ...

5 = Fifth letter in alphabet = E
7 = Seventh letter in alphabet = G
6 = Sixth letter in alphabet = F

576 = EGF = Evansville Glass Factory? Prior to Graham Glass the plant was known as the Evansville Glass Co.

I found exactly 165 hobble-skirts with the number 576. 105 of them had an EG and a double-digit number that ranged between 20 and 28 - which is roughly 65%. The majority part can be easily explained - more demand more production between 1920 and 1928. But why the EG?

Evansville Glass?
Evansville Graham?
Other?

I'm leaving on a road trip this morning and will be gone for about a week - see y'all when I get back.

Bob

 

[bottle-o-pop]

Sodabob, no it isn't a Coca-Cola bottle. It's a Frank Banko bottle.
Here is a photo of the Banko bottle. It has lost most of its gloss. It's a pity (pun intended).
Also attached is what looks like a valve mark on the underside of the Banko bottle.

 

[winmeek1]

Hi, found this one recently and having problems finding much online about it. Had to photo edit a little to get (very faint) mark to show in pics. Any help would be appreciated!

Hi, found this one recently and having problems finding much online about it. Had to photo edit a little to get (very faint) mark to show in pics. Any help would be appreciated!

the number looks like 37681

 

[Canadacan]

the number looks like 37681

576EP is what has been determined

 

[SODABOB]

Thanks, bop

It definitely looks like the same valve mark - which is slightly off-center just like on my bottle. I don't see a hairline seam like mine has, but I'm not going to split hairs (pun intended) over that particular feature. The main thing is that botth bottles were machine made.

Back to 1916 ...

Even though there are only a handful of newspaper ads from 1916 that include illustrations of the new hobble-skirt, I believe they are enough to indicate that the new bottle was almost certainly introduced in the fall of that year. We also know about the Morphy auction bottle that was described as a test bottle. Call me a skeptic, but I'm not fully convinced yet about all of that - especially the part that claimed all but one of the test bottles were destroyed. Maybe they were destroyed and maybe they weren't, I really don't know. However, regardless of that controversary I'm still trying to figure out what the bottles looked like, and if they have some type of mark or characteristic, that were illustrated and advertised in November of 1916. Unfortunately, the only clues I am aware of are the illustrations themselves. Hence, I have attached both illustrations. I also attached a photo of the so-called Morphy test bottle for comparison. To make it easier to compare all three, I converted the Morphy bottle to black & white. By the way, take a close look at the illustrated bottles - especially the lower right portion of the heel. Even though the part I'm referring to is intended to be a small bit of light reflection, they sort of look like the letters L and J. I'm not suggesting they are letters, because they aren't. The main reason I even mention them is because they are identical on both of the illustrated bottles. That can't be just a coincidence - meaning the source of the illustrations must have been the same - probably originating from the Coca Cola headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. One of the illustrations is from Tampa, Florida and the other one is from Columbus, Georgia. The distance between Tampa and Columbus is about 400 miles. In my opinion there is no way that two different newspaper artists in two different states would have come up with identical illustrations. I'm also inclined to believe that the illustrations depict what the hobble-skirts actually looked like at the time. One thing seems relatively certain: the illustrations definitely do not look identical to the so-called Morphy test bottle.

Long story short ...

I am convinced more than ever that 1916 hobble-skirts do exist. If true, all we need to do now is figure out how to identify them.

The search continues!

Bob

Attachments ...

1. Tampa, Florida - November 12, 1916
2. Columbus, Georgia - November 15, 1916
3. So-called test bottle - converted to black & white