Purple Bottles

I collected pretty much everything when I was a kid.  I collected rocks.  I collected matchbooks.  I collected feathers.  I collected old bones.  I collected old newspapers.  I collected old bottles.  As mentioned in a previous blog, my sisters would not to go into my room because it was, according to them, “gross.”  I lived in a boy-cave.

Sisters just don’t get it.

Bottles have changed a great deal over the years.  At one time, bottles were both ornate and colorful.  Many of my older bottles have long slender necks.  Some have fancy writing expressed on the glass itself.  Most of those are greenish in color, brown, or relatively clear.  My favorite are the purple bottles.

Fact is, most bottle-makers wanted to produce clear bottles.  According to an article I found at the Corning Museum of Glass website, most of the older greenish bottles are that color due to impurities such as iron oxide.  The bottle-makers were shooting for clear but missed their mark.

In the mid-19^th century, American glassmakers started using manganese oxide, which they called “glassmaker’s soap,” as a decolorizer.  Bottles made with manganese dioxide were clear, but only in the short term.  The bottles gradually turned various shades of purple when exposed to sunlight or any other source of ultra-violet light.  Some have turned a deep purple by this date.

Early in the 20^th century, new manufacturing methods produced clear glass without the use of glassmaker’s soap.  So ended purple bottles.

 

Bottles today are not even bottles.  I give as example the crinkly, squeezy plastic thingies we use for water.  Glass bottles are now, for the most part, simple and utilitarian.  Posted today is a photograph I captured of what you find inside a “box” of wine.  Not a bottle in any sense—more like the entrails you might expect to find if you dissected Barney (the purple dinosaur).

Now that I consider it, dissecting Barney is one of my better thoughts.

--Mitchell Hegman