At the beginning of the nineteenth century, most bottles in the United States and England were either free-blown—formed on the end of a blowpipe without aid of a mold—or blown into a one-piece “dip mold” that formed only the basic body shape. Neither of these processes allowed large-scale production of oddly shaped or embossed containers, and since even dip-molded bottles were formed by hand above the shoulder, the bottles tended to be asymmetrical.
Hinged two-piece molds, capable of shaping the shoulder and neck as well as the body of the bottle, had occasionally been used in England as early as the 1750s, but they did not become common in the U. S. until the second and third decades of the nineteenth century. A three-piece mold with a dip body and hinged neck and shoulder parts, developed in England shortly after the turn of the century, was popularized by an 1821 patent taken out by the Henry Ricketts Company of Bristol. These two forms, especially the two-piece mold, remained the most common mold types throughout the nineteenth century. On early two-piece molds, the pieces were hinged in the center of the base, but a more stable mold with a separate base part was developed by the late 1850s and was almost universally used in the later decades of the century.
On almost all mouth-blown bottles, whether free-blown or blown in a complex mold, the lip and upper neck were formed in a separate process after the otherwise complete article had been removed from the blowpipe. This process, the last step in the formation of the bottle, was known as “finishing,” and the completed lip came to be called the “finish.” In the early part of the nineteenth century, bottles were finished with simple hand tools such as shears, but by 1840, a specialized “lipping tool” with a central plug and one or more rotating external arms had been introduced. This tool produced a smoother and more uniform finish, and remained in use until the industry was fully automated in the twentieth century.
While the finish was being formed, most bottles were held by an iron pontil rod affixed to the base with molten glass. This process left a rough scar on the bottom of the bottle where the pontil had been detached. Holding devices which gripped the body of the bottle and eliminated the need for empontilling were apparently known in England in the 1820s, but did not become common in American glasshouses until the 1840s or 50s. By the 1870s use of the pontil rod had almost entirely ceased.
The most significant American contribution to the early nineteenth century glass industry was the development in the 1820s of the hand-operated side-lever pressing machine. This device consisted of a single- or multi-piece mold into which the glass was pressed by means of a plunger. Since the plunging process required wide-mouthed molds, pressing was used primarily for glass tableware, although straight-sided jars were also pressed in the later part of the century.
In 1864 William Leighton of J. H. Hobbs, Brockunier, & Co. in West Virginia perfected a formula for an inexpensive soda-based glass that was as crystalline as the heavy lead glass previously used for most American-made clear glass items. This new glass revolutionized the pressed glass tableware industry, and probably was responsible for the flood of clear glass medicinal and household bottles that followed the Civil War. Like earlier clear glass, the improved lime glass was tinted with manganese oxide to remove its natural green coloring. Clear glass items manufactured with manganese tend to turn varying shades of lavender when left exposed to the sun. Manganese was imported from Germany in the nineteenth century to decolor glass and was no longer used after the outbreak of World War I.
In the immediate post-Civil War period, the American glass industry expanded rapidly. Molds were improved and worker and furnace productivity increased to many times their 1800 level. New bottle shapes were introduced, and specialized and embossed bottles proliferated. The manufacture of preserve jars became a major industry, and a special “blow-back” mold, included in John Mason’s 1858 fruit jar patent, was used to form the screw threads for the sealable lids. Standard bottle shapes for different products became common, as did uniformly applied standard lip forms for different purposes. The standard shapes of the bottles from the Middleton Place privy are shown in [Figure 16]. Turnmolding, a long-known method of removing mold marks by rotating the unfinished bottle in the mold, became a popular way of manufacturing unblemished wine bottles. A popular technique of embossing was plate-molding, an operation in which a personalized name plate could be inserted into a standard mold for inexpensive lettering of even small runs of bottles.
Figure 16. Bottle shapes from the Middleton Place privy (not to scale). A. Champagne beer. B. Export beer. C. Malt whiskey. D. Jo-Jo flask. E. Union Oval flask. F. Bordeaux wine. G. Hock wine. H. Olive oil. I. American preserve. J. Fluted extract. K. Bromo-Seltzer. L. Poison. M. French square. N. Baltimore oval. O. Philadelphia oval. P. Double Philadelphia oval. Q. Plain oval. R. Panel. S. Ball neck panel. T. Oil panel. U. Round prescription. V. Quinine. W. Morphine. X. Free-blown apothecary’s vial. Y. Round patch box. Z. Ointment. AA. Stoneware ink. BB. Bell mucilage. CC. Cone ink. DD. Cylinder ink.
The first mechanized production of bottles in the United States was on a semiautomatic “press-and-blow” machine patented by Philip Argobast in 1881 and used by the Enterprise Glass Co. of Pittsburgh to make Vaseline jars in 1893. Although the molten glass still had to be gathered and dropped into the mold by hand, the Argobast machine could produce completely machine-molded wide-mouth jars by pressing the lip and blowing the body in two separate operations. Semiautomatic production rapidly took over the fruit jar industry, and by the turn of the century most fruit jars were made on semiautomatic machines rather than in the traditional blow-back molds. Narrow-necked bottles, however, could not be manufactured on “press-and-blow” machines because the plunger for the pressing operation could not be withdrawn through a narrow opening. Although a “blow-and-blow” machine for narrow-necked bottles was developed in England in the late 1880s, semiautomatics for small-mouthed ware were apparently not introduced in the U.S. until after the development of the automatic Owens bottle machine in 1903.