I am a researcher of the Brookfield glass company. I am currently working on a second history book concerning them and the huge role they played in the glass industry in America that has been hidden by history.
Last Saturday I was at an insulator show and a friend of mine had a (Arc) THE / MALTINE/ MFG CO / CHEMISTS / NEW YORK bottle in his table for 5.00.
I turned it over and was surprised to see something I recognized from the crown embossing of MANY Brookfield insulators. A small number 5 matched up with the "hand" of the engraver I believe I recognize form those insulators.
Nuts right? Well, suffice it to say I spent 15 years (on and off as I encountered different specimens) hand tracing the lettering of the crown embossing of hundreds of variants of the insulators I mention. I wrote a reference book, published in 2015, that has a large section where every embossing is meticulously recorded down to positioning of punctuation and length of underscores used in each mold to help collectors make a positive ID.
So...I got onto eBay and and found every large Maltine bottle I could that also showed the bottom and the number there. Lo and behold the engraver's styles for these are familiar to me also.
But it was only on the larger bottles, not the smaller sizes of this bottle, that I recognized the "hand" that engraved the numbers.
I have included pictures and cross references from my book.
Now, unlike a lot of what is called science nowadays, I will not say this is a proven fact form what appears to be pretty good evidence. I cannot prove it b/c we have no eye witnesses and actual science is, by definition, based upon observation. But I think this is a pretty good match.
Yeah, I know, we insulator collectors can be crazy with details like this. But playing Sherlock Holmes is very exciting when things like this show up!
This is the tip of the iceburg. I have an 1875 Brooklyn Eagle article saying Brookfield had huge warehouse full of customer bottle molds. But since Brookfield did not use a makers mark on them (few exceptions), we have to rely on stuff like this to hopefully identify some of them. And research has taught me Brookfield was a lot (understatement) larger than anyone previously thought.
Last Saturday I was at an insulator show and a friend of mine had a (Arc) THE / MALTINE/ MFG CO / CHEMISTS / NEW YORK bottle in his table for 5.00.
I turned it over and was surprised to see something I recognized from the crown embossing of MANY Brookfield insulators. A small number 5 matched up with the "hand" of the engraver I believe I recognize form those insulators.
Nuts right? Well, suffice it to say I spent 15 years (on and off as I encountered different specimens) hand tracing the lettering of the crown embossing of hundreds of variants of the insulators I mention. I wrote a reference book, published in 2015, that has a large section where every embossing is meticulously recorded down to positioning of punctuation and length of underscores used in each mold to help collectors make a positive ID.
So...I got onto eBay and and found every large Maltine bottle I could that also showed the bottom and the number there. Lo and behold the engraver's styles for these are familiar to me also.
But it was only on the larger bottles, not the smaller sizes of this bottle, that I recognized the "hand" that engraved the numbers.
I have included pictures and cross references from my book.
Now, unlike a lot of what is called science nowadays, I will not say this is a proven fact form what appears to be pretty good evidence. I cannot prove it b/c we have no eye witnesses and actual science is, by definition, based upon observation. But I think this is a pretty good match.
Yeah, I know, we insulator collectors can be crazy with details like this. But playing Sherlock Holmes is very exciting when things like this show up!
This is the tip of the iceburg. I have an 1875 Brooklyn Eagle article saying Brookfield had huge warehouse full of customer bottle molds. But since Brookfield did not use a makers mark on them (few exceptions), we have to rely on stuff like this to hopefully identify some of them. And research has taught me Brookfield was a lot (understatement) larger than anyone previously thought.
