Robert Turlington's Balsam Of Life

[Steve/sewell]

Dr. Dyott ad from the year 1817 in the The American Centinel and Mercantile Advertiser May 19th 1817 front page.This is a Large inventory ad that had to cost him quite a bit back in the day.Here you can see he spells Balsam correctly.

 

[deepbluedigger]

How'd I miss this thread up to now? Great stuff. Have spent the last 15 minutes reading the earlier posts to catch up.

Walter's Turlingtons collection is truly exceptional - he's got some great stuff, and the 1750 bottle ('violin shape')is a super-rare find, with or without the neck and lip.

I've got a small group of Turlingtons, both British and American. I'll get some decent photos and post them here.

The most recent photo-chronology that Steve has put up seems to be getting pretty close. Very interesting to see info from someone who has a good feel for the earlier US made Turlington bottles. That is like gold dust for me, since I'm trying to figure out early US bottles from a distance.

This, and the discussion on the other 'labelled phial' thread, has made be more certain that the early flint one I mentioned as possibly being American, is actually British.

Until quite recently there was an opinion among collectors of early British bottles that Turlington was possibly the earliest user of embossed bottles on a commercial scale here. But now it seems that he was just one of several who were all using embossed during the 1740s. Others include Richard Rock (Rock's Viper Drops: an incredible bottle), Jacksons Tincture (this is not the same as Jacksons Cordial Bitter Tincture, which is slightly later), and probably at least two Daffy's Elixir proprietors.

If there are records of that many users of embossed bottles there must have been others, and for so many to have been using embossed bottles in the early to mid 1740s I suspect the practice may have started ten or twenty years earlier, although so far there's no hard evidence for that.

There were moulded bottles in Roman times, and later in SE Europe / the middle east, but in Britain and NW Europe, and especially for commercial containers rather than luxury items, mould blowing with embossing doesn't seem to have been revived until the 1st half of the 18th century (as Mark will confirm, there are some early 18th century 'freeblown' wines with faint embossing. I suspect that was done by shaping on an engraved marver rather than in a mould).

The exact timing of Turlington first marketing his medicine is unclear, but he was almost certainly selling the stuff before the 1744 date of his patent. He changed his bottle shape at least 3 times between the mid 1740s and 1754, each time because his medicine and previous bottle type was being widely copied / faked.
- His earliest bottle was probably a standard unembossed freeblown phial. But maybe not. It's a mystery.
- His first embossed bottle was probably the tapered rectangular one (photo posted earlier, damaged example in the Museum of London). Dates seem to vary. On the Museum of London bottle the date seems to be 1748, but there are newspaper adverts showing this bottle at least as early as 1746.
- His second bottle was probably the violin shaped bottle. Several examples known, including Walter's necked bottle. Probably introduced around 1750.
- His third bottle was what he called his 'tablet' shaped bottle (probably thinking of 'a tablet of stone' rather than a medicine tablet), with the 1754 date. That became the standard over the next 150 years, with all the variations that turn up on both sides of the Atlantic.

There are plenty of mysteries about his bottles. For example, most violin shaped bottles have a 1750 date, but examples are known with both 1751 and 1752 dates (one example turned up in the Caribbean). So maybe with that bottle, and the previous one, he changed the date on the mould every year in an effort to keep ahead of the forgers.

Will post some photos of my very few Turlington bottles later.

Someone asked to see a Daffy's or two, so in the meantime here's my current favourite Daffy's bottle. I was a bit disappointed a couple of weeks ago when I found some information that disproves my previous theory about who the proprietor of this bottle was.

I had thought it was Anthony Daffy Swinton (very interesting but nasty - in fact probably psychopathic - character who ended his days transported to Australia for theft of a gold watch. It was a capital crime at the time but for some reason this sentence was not imposed). But it turns out his bottles were different. So it's back to the drawing board with this one. (It can't be the original Dr A Daffy, as he was a 17th century quack who was dead by the late 1680s. There then followed 150 years of feuding between different sides of the family about who owned the rights to, and sold, the genuine article. Several different characters, including Swinton, seem to have called themselves Dr Anthony Daffy during the late 18th and early 19th centuries).

 

[earlyglasscollector]

Nice post Jerry, was wondering where you were, which probably accounts for why you haven't answered the Cephalic snuff thread also?..... Check it out, you'll hav eplenty to say there I'm sure. (I used one of your pics there by the way).
egc

 

[Road Dog]

There seems to have been an effort to combat the counterfeiting problem. All the spelling variations:
IANY, JANY, JANU, JAN

BALSOM, BALSAM, BALSLM, BALSM

ROYALL, ROYAL

and like Jerry mentioned the changing of the dates and styles of bottles as well.

 

[Road Dog]

ORIGINAL: Steve/sewell

Dr. Dyott ad from the year 1817 in the The American Centinel and Mercantile Advertiser May 19th 1817 front page.This is a Large inventory ad that had to cost him quite a bit back in the day.Here you can see he spells Balsam correctly.

Offers for sale from the American and European Manufactories? Wonder if that is why the spelling is with an "A' here? Before the 1820's was Dyott a distributor more than a glass maker for these? Great ad Steve, one of your newspapers?

 

[earlyglasscollector]

I would personally say that all those spelling variations are not so much an effort to combat counterfeitors as a simple lack of literacy, (logical though Road Dog's suggestion would seem to all of us) and the fact that there was no officially defined or rather accepted spelling of words until early 19th Century in UK. Interestingly one of the reasons this WAS encouraged was the upsurgence of American versions of spelling and the seen requirement here (uk) then to definitely differentiate between American and Briton cultures. The abolishing of the long S (or F as it appears, was one of the signs of this, and there are few books with the long S after 1810.
But even when there was accepted correct spelling, the majority of those with reading and writing abilities would not have placed over much emphasis on getting it "right". Phonectic spelling was commonplace (spelling it like it sounded). Even those craftsmen working with lettering often still could not necessarily read themselves, which inevitably lead to some of the humurous mistakes we see within bottles, sometimes with inverted letters, often with odd spellings. We also see the practice of "cramming in" and forshortening or abreviating words to fit into wherever was needed, We see this particularly on early Turlingtons, but also on early seals of wine bottles etc. Such haphazard working and slack attitude to correctness is something we wince at now, but then this was not seen to be so important.
Simple changes of spelling in any case would rarely have been noticed or appreciated by the average buyer, only the shape.

egc www.earlyglass.com

 

[Road Dog]

True Mark those early glassmakers could have used some spelling lessons.[] The Turlington of mine I posted has all the letters crammed in so they are not evev in a line. Embossing is up to the neck and under the bottle. Some of the words are missing as well. Makes it all the more interesting for folks trying to piece history together to make some sort of sense.

 

[cowseatmaize]

So it's back to the drawing board with this one. (It can't be the original Dr A Daffy, as he was a 17th century quack who was dead by the late 1680s.

Although it's different it's similar with the TW Dyott and Robertson story. Dates and stuff don't match.

During his lifetime, Thomas W. Dyott himself claimed to be the grandson of the
celebrated Dr. Robertson of Edinburgh. Unfortunately, not only is there no evidence that
he was Dr. Robertson’s grandson, but also there is no record of a Dr. Robertson
practicing in Edinburgh during the time. The only other tidbit of information about
Thomas W. Dyott’s life during this period is a statement made by one of his intimates,
claiming that Thomas W. Dyott served an apprenticeship to an English druggist, who
taught him the art of making boot-blacking. Much more HERE

 

[deepbluedigger]

I think Mark is probably right about literacy. It's likely that there just wasn't a need to be especially accurate among the forgers, for all kinds of reasons including illiteracy among the end buyers.

It's also worth bearing in mind that by 1800 the medicine had probably more or less progressed to the status of a generic: a bit like aspirin today, with numerous manufacturers and retailers. Even the stuff put in the bottles was probably highly variable by then.

Turlington himself was long dead, and the legal proprietors of the medicine by that time, at least in Britain and the existing colonies, were the Wray family, but trying to protect and enforce their rights was difficult, and in the US probably impossible.

So there was less pressure for detailed conformity to the original bottle design among people selling the medicine, and there was a gradual increase in bottles which were less and less like the originals (for example, with very little embossing, like the "The King's Patent // Turlingtons Balsam" bottles without any other embossing).

There probably never has been a US-manufactured Turlington's bottle that contained medicine from Turlington himself, or from the Wrays (but both of those proprietors are known to have exported their medicine, in bottles, to the US).

 

[deepbluedigger]

My 4 flint glass Turlingtons (the damaged one on the left is the one Chris posted a picture of earlier in this thread)

I'd be interested to hear what people think about likely dates for these, or even which date order is most likely. I have some ideas, but no real confidence in them.

(apologies for marking it: I've started doing that recently because a few of my photos turned up in for-profit hard copy publications here in the UK late last year without so much as an acknowledgement or by-your-leave).