Skoda
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Apr 15, 2016
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- 85
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Hi all,
One of the (few) highlights of last year for me was a bit of research I dove into on a bottle I had acquired several years back. It's a circa early 1870's era Valentine Loewer Lager Bier out of NYC with a fully intact and functional closure (sans the rubber being hard as a rock), despite the rust and pitting. When I first got it I identified it as a Kutscher closure and called it a day, but looking at it again I realized it was an absolute misidentification. There was nothing on the sodasandbeers database that quite matched mine, so off to google patents I went! I narrowed my search terms between the late 1865-1878 and went through every single "bottle stopper" patent I could find, and after about an hour digging through them, I believe I found it! It is assigned to H. Morgenstern and the patent drawings are near identical- the only difference being the lack of a hinge on the side of the bail without the clip. The date of the patent matches the era of the bottle AND it's inventor was out of NYC, so despite the slight difference I'm pretty confident this is a match. Morgenstern has a few other patents under his name but it appears that he died in the late 1870's as he's listed as "deceased" on an 1877 patent. The assignee on that one is H.W. Putnam (the H.W. Putnam), which is a pretty incredible connection. I'm going to be forwarding this info to the sodasandbeers site when I finally put a big email together, but I figured I'd share this here as well!
One of the (few) highlights of last year for me was a bit of research I dove into on a bottle I had acquired several years back. It's a circa early 1870's era Valentine Loewer Lager Bier out of NYC with a fully intact and functional closure (sans the rubber being hard as a rock), despite the rust and pitting. When I first got it I identified it as a Kutscher closure and called it a day, but looking at it again I realized it was an absolute misidentification. There was nothing on the sodasandbeers database that quite matched mine, so off to google patents I went! I narrowed my search terms between the late 1865-1878 and went through every single "bottle stopper" patent I could find, and after about an hour digging through them, I believe I found it! It is assigned to H. Morgenstern and the patent drawings are near identical- the only difference being the lack of a hinge on the side of the bail without the clip. The date of the patent matches the era of the bottle AND it's inventor was out of NYC, so despite the slight difference I'm pretty confident this is a match. Morgenstern has a few other patents under his name but it appears that he died in the late 1870's as he's listed as "deceased" on an 1877 patent. The assignee on that one is H.W. Putnam (the H.W. Putnam), which is a pretty incredible connection. I'm going to be forwarding this info to the sodasandbeers site when I finally put a big email together, but I figured I'd share this here as well!