Sand Pontil Cologne...?

[Staunton Dan]

I found 2 perfume bottles yesterday, both French. This one is 6-sided and has a rough bottom and the lip is rolled inward or it's possibly flared, it difficult to tell. It is embossed F. Maria Farina No. 4711 a Cologne. Is this a sand pontil and because it is French, would it date possibly a little later than a bottle made in the States?

 

[Staunton Dan]

Here's the other one, same height about 5" but it has 2 narrow flat panels and 2 curved sides. The bottom is much smoother but again the flared lip and just the number 4 embossed on one of the flat panels.

 

[Plumbata]

Nice finds Dan, but I highly doubt that either bottle is much older than the dumpsite you are digging. The irregularities or glass shards you see occur pretty commonly in blown glass.

As far as I understand, when the molten glass is inflated to the molds capacity, the blowpipe is drawn away and a bubble of glass is created above the neck/closure area. The bottle is removed and that bubble of thin glass is broken/shattered off so that the lip area can be reheated and then tooled. Those bits of glass are most likely shards of that bubble that got stuck on the base after the lip was tooled and it was set aside to be sent to the annealing oven. I've seen such chips of glass on the inside of bottles too, often seen at the bottom of a blown mason jar, but most commonly on the outside base of all sorts of blown bottles.

One of these days you need to show some action shots of the dump you are digging, or shots of a dirty day's haul. No need to give away clues or anything, but it would be awesome to see some of the pits you're working on and get a better understanding of the whole process, not just the cleaned end result. It is a good end result though, don't get me wrong.

 

[coboltmoon]

Maria Farina

I have had the Maria Farina before and it had the same strange pontil type base. I had thought mine was a later pontil 1870 or so. I would call it a glass pontil. From my understanding a glass pontil had crushed glass on the blow pipe tip before it held the bottle instead of sand or graphite.

The one I had had the same crude lipless neck.

 

[Staunton Dan]

What you say makes sense. The bottom certainly does have melted glass pieces on it which is unlike any other blown bottle that I have found before. These melted glass pieces however tend to be further away from the bottom's center than I would have thought suggesting that if it were pontiled, a rod other than the blowpipe would have been used. Does that make sense?

 

[RED Matthews]

Hello to all again. Especially Plumbata; If you go to Bill Lindsey's pages of bottle information at http://www. SHA.org/bottles/index/htm There you can search for information on bursted off finishes, and watch a little video of men making a beer type bottles with this process. Early mustards, jars and canning jars were made with bursted off finishes that required grinding the tops for a good sealing surface on the jars. RED Matthews

 

[VA is for Diggers]

Actually, the maker was Italian and worked in Cologne Germany. Nice bottle.

 

[Plumbata]

Red:
The burst or bubble finishing technique wasn't exclusive to ground-top or the obvious burst top bottles, was it? That is a good website, one of the absolute best out there.

Dan:
First I must say that my statements are based on what I can discern from the photo. Having it in-hand might change things.

The fact that the pieces of glass are in the area where the bottle would have come in direct contact with the surface it was resting upon makes perfect sense, as long as one doesn't then assume it is some form of pontiling technique. The principle of Occam's Razor more or less works here. Did someone go through many steps to purposefully leave those glass chunks in your bottle, or did someone spend no time or take no additional steps to put those chunks there, by setting it in an area in a glasshouse that happened to have some small bits of glass laying around?

I see stuff like this all the time on glass I dig. Here is the most handy example, as it is 3 feet away from me:

Base of Globe Jar (it has a straw line too!):

And some less handy examples:

My rare glass-chip pontiled 3-in-1 oil: []

Upper left corner and the top edge has the most extra glass.

McAvoy Beer:

Gettelman beer:

The beers might have come in contact with glass bits that managed to get inside the mold before the blown glass filled the cavity, but the 3-in-1 almost certainly didn't.


I have many more that I can pull out, and I know that I have some stunning examples loaded with the glass chips floating around somewhere. I hope to be proven wrong by someone with more experience (shouldn't be hard to do) and shown that what you have is indeed a weird kind of pontil, but until then I stand by my assumption.

Best regards Dan, hopefully you find some OPs on your next dig that are entirely unambiguous. []

 

[coboltmoon]

I found a photo of the bottle I owned.

 

[coboltmoon]

The one I had did have different embossing.