Tooled or Applied....or???

[sodetraveler]

On Sunday night I pulled a couple more bottles from my cliff-side hole

One was an applied lip black glass wine - nuff said about that.....

The other was what I at first thought was an ABM screw top whiskey flask. I arrived at this conclusion because when I did a quick check of the top I noted that it was smooth - and in the past any handblown bottle with a screw top had a ground lip (except for some ketchups that have a significant smooth section above the threads).

When I got home and cleaned it off I was presented with a bit of a mystery. There is no seam going through the threaded portion at all, so it's certainly not ABM!

The seam stops at the bottom of a horizontal ring that goes around the neck. The seam also takes a hard bend to the left as it goes up the neck, which suggests that the entire top was twisted while it was still hot (i.e. during lip forming operations).

Now, in the past when I've seen a seam dissapear into the bottom of the lip it almost always indicated an applied lip - especially if there were no horizontal tooling marks. However, this particular lip doesn't have any of the typical "glopped on" appearance of an applied lip

You guys have probably seen more of these than I have. Any idea how this lip was formed and/or applied? I appreciate any suggestions

 

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[Harry Pristis]

You have it right . . . a tooled "new" whiskey flask from the early 1900s.

 

[PikesPeakCharlie]

it has a fire polished lip, instead of the ground top ,late 1890s to around 1910.Too bad it isnt embossed

 

[gleaner1]

If it's tooled, it's applied. And if it's applied, it probably is tooled, but not necessarily. Tooling implies an instrument to shape the lip. If you have a simple sheared mouth, yet it is widened, or a pouring "vee" was added like on master inks, or inward rolled lip, it surely is tooled. A simple sheared and fire polished neck with no other treatment is neither tooled nor applied. Applied screw types did not have the screw in the mold. Hence, the screw was applied, or tooled, which is not common. I bet your bot has a screw that was "in the mold", so the threads were not "applied". To finish off, it required a careful shear and fire polish, just above the top of the molded threads. I guess that if you look closely, you will see a seam going right up thru the threads, showing that the threads were molded. And if so, your bot is neither tooled, nor applied lip, just sheared and fire polished, like many of the grand old flasks.

 

[Harry Pristis]

If it's tooled, it's applied. And if it's applied, it probably is tooled, but not necessarily. Tooling implies an instrument to shape the lip. If you have a simple sheared mouth, yet it is widened, or a pouring "vee" was added like on master inks, or inward rolled lip, it surely is tooled. A simple sheared and fire polished neck with no other treatment is neither tooled nor applied. Applied screw types did not have the screw in the mold. Hence, the screw was applied, or tooled, which is not common. I bet your bot has a screw that was "in the mold", so the threads were not "applied". To finish off, it required a careful shear and fire polish, just above the top of the molded threads. I guess that if you look closely, you will see a seam going right up thru the threads, showing that the threads were molded. And if so, your bot is neither tooled, nor applied lip, just sheared and fire polished, like many of the grand old flasks.

'Gleaner1' is toying with us . . . word-play, it seems. We know that "applied lip" connotes a lip tooled from an extra blob of glass affixed to the neck of the bottle. Contrast that technique with the "tooled lip" which connotes a lip tooled from the neck without the addition of an extra blob of glass.

In other words, such bottle lips are tooled (in the broad sense), creating either a "tooled lip" or, when an extra bit of glass is involved, an "applied lip." So, it's confusing to use the broad terms, "applied" and "tooled" in a context that ignores their specific meanings in glass-collecting jargon.

In a production line, fire-polishing represents an expensive extra step. Fire-polishing became retro when effective lipping tools were introduced in the early 1800s. Such a costly step would have been avoided if possible. This screw top bottle was probably made by machine, though not by an Owens machine, in the early 1900s.

 

[gleaner1]

Harry is totally correct on this, my bad. A tooled lip does not require additional glass. An applied lip requires additional glass. I will post some pics to further address this very good topic. I do not have examples of tooled threaded pieces though.

 

[sodetraveler]

Thanks Guys!

After some very careful examination I discovered extremely faint remnants of seam lines in the threaded area. They appear to have been almost entirely eliminated, most probably by fire polishing.

The seam line below the neck ring is very prominent, so the illusion that it disappeared into the ring was quite convincing until I closely examined the area looking for evidence that the top could have bee applied. Although the ring appears to be perfectly smooth, a couple of the threads had tiny bumps that seemed to line up with the seam on the neck - although a distinct twisting of the seam was still in evidence as they appeared further and further to the left on each thread.

It looks like there may have been some tooling on the top 1/8th inch or so where there are no threads. This is similar to many hand blown ketchup bottles I have found that have a much larger gap between the top of the thread and the top of the bottle.

Mystery solved!

 

[Harry Pristis]

Thanks Guys!

After some very careful examination I discovered extremely faint remnants of seam lines in the threaded area. They appear to have been almost entirely eliminated, most probably by fire polishing.

The seam line below the neck ring is very prominent, so the illusion that it disappeared into the ring was quite convincing until I closely examined the area looking for evidence that the top could have bee applied. Although the ring appears to be perfectly smooth, a couple of the threads had tiny bumps that seemed to line up with the seam on the neck - although a distinct twisting of the seam was still in evidence as they appeared further and further to the left on each thread.

It looks like there may have been some tooling on the top 1/8th inch or so where there are no threads. This is similar to many hand blown ketchup bottles I have found that have a much larger gap between the top of the thread and the top of the bottle.

Mystery solved!

I don't believe that is the correct answer. I would have deduced:
After some very careful examination I discovered extremely faint remnants of seam lines in the threaded area. They appear to have been almost entirely eliminated, most probably by the lipping tool.

 

[sodetraveler]

I don't believe that is the correct answer. I would have deduced:
After some very careful examination I discovered extremely faint remnants of seam lines in the threaded area. They appear to have been almost entirely eliminated, most probably by the lipping tool.

Hello Harry!

I'm an engineer by trade and the reason this mystery at first caused me such consternation was because I could not imagine any lipping tool that could both create a descending helical thread pattern and at the same time create a perfectly horizontal ring around the neck.

The tool either has to "screw down" along the threads or turn perfectly horizontally to create (or at least maintain) the ring. How to do both?!??

Well, the faint seam remnants in the threaded area solved that for me, both the horizontal ring and descending thread were produced in a mold. My assumption is still that the tooling was only applied to the top 1/8" of the lip to clean up the rough edge where it was separated from the blow pipe.

However, I still feel the need to understand why such a prominent seam line could so magically disappear at the base of the horizontal ring? Now, I hear what you're saying about fire polishing, but I also know that fire polishing was used even on ABM milk bottles. I have many milk bottles from the 20's, 30's and 40's that could easily be mistaken for BIMAL (at least by a novice collector) because the seams dissappear on the neck.

While it's not clear to me why this was done on milk bottles, it is quite clear why it would have been done on my whiskey flask. As an mechanical engineer, one thing I deal with every day is screw threads. I can tell you that if the monster seam line on the neck of this flask had extended up into the thread, it would have made the cap quite difficult to screw on and off! I also know a bit about molds and it's pretty safe to assume that a fairly prominent seam existed on both the ring and the threads when the mold was first opened.

The only tool/process that could have done this seam removal without destroying the threads would have to be some sort of light brush. I see no evidence of brush marks, so I'm going to have to side with gleaner1 on this one and say that this bottle was fire polished. As expensive as that extra process may have been, it would have been the cheapest way to get rid of those seam lines.

I should also ad that it's much easier to draw conclusions about a bottle held in hand than one depicted in a blurry cell phone picture. I'm fairly certain that if you (Harry) had the opportunity to actually see this bottle up close you might just agree.....

 

[Harry Pristis]

It's easy enough to imagine a stationary collar producing the ring while a threaded plunger moved down then up inside the collar. Remember that this bottle can be dated to a time that bottling machines of many designs were being employed. Within just a few years, these machines were replaced by the Owens design.

What I suggested is, "This screw top bottle was probably made by machine, though not by an Owens machine, in the early 1900s." I still believe that based on what I know of bottle-making. The bottle is a sophisticated manufacturing design, not some throwback to the early 1800s. Nor is it pyro-glazing (I'm thinking Duraglas, 1940+) that was popular in mid-1900s milk bottles.

I'm not sure how you can argue for fire polishing when you observed the traces of the mold seam moved to the left on the glass threads. ("Although the ring appears to be perfectly smooth, a couple of the threads had tiny bumps that seemed to line up with the seam on the neck - although a distinct twisting of the seam was still in evidence as they appeared further and further to the left on each thread.")

Furthermore, fire polishing could distort the threads as readily as it obliterated a mold seam.

On a screw cap, it is the inside of the cap top that seals with the glass rim of the lip; the threads serve only to hold the seal tight. Fire polishing of the lip could easily distort the glass rim, making the seal impossible.

But, you're right . . . I don't have the bottle in hand . . . And, I don't know which machine was used to produce this advanced design. I can only argue that bottle production always advanced toward a more sophisticated design, not the other way.

 

[sodetraveler]

It's easy enough to imagine a stationary collar producing the ring while a threaded plunger moved down then up inside the collar. Remember that this bottle can be dated to a time that bottling machines of many designs were being employed. Within just a few years, these machines were replaced by the Owens design.

OK, for the sake of further discussion let's assume that this bottle was made using some advanced (at least for 1900) type of bottling machine.

The collar you describe would have to be removable, so it would have to separate into two peices. It would also have to be used to form (or perhaps just hold?) the neck ring while it was still hot in order for the glass to still be pliable enough to form the threads.

One would assume that this collar would leave some sort of seam of it's own along it's break line. It would also be possible that this seam would not be in alignment with the larger mold seam on the sides, shoulder and neck of the bottle.

Having unfortunately (because I'd rather be digging punty boys) spent the vast majority of my digging years in transition dumps (i.e. transition from BIMAL to ABM), I'm very familiar with the various seam lines associated with non-Owens bottling machines.

Having a completely different set of seams associated with the neck and lip is quite common, although no matter how many times I read about it on www.sha.org, I still can't wrap my head around how they can get one seam line to dissapear and a new one to appear somewhere else!

The one thing I've never seen before - except on BIMAL bottles - is a seam that has been twisted on the neck. It seems to be a quite common occurrence on Tooled bottles (and Applied too because as gleaner1 pointed out they were also "tooled"), presumably as a result of the lipping tool twisting the entire neck as the tool was rotated.

This particular flask has quite the twist to it! I've tried to take a better picture to capture this and to my surprise, you can also see tiny traces of the seam in the ring and first thread. Can your hypothetical machining process include some explanation as to how this twisting occurred?

You may also note from this improved picture that the screw threads appear to be almost melted in their lack of distinct profile. This is what I would expect to see if they were exposed to intense heat after being removed from the mold.

 

[Harry Pristis]

Thank you for the additional image. I don't see any heat distortion of the threads. If there were distortion, it would affect the lip, putting the QC people into an uproar on the production line.

What I do see is a machine-made bottle with a twist, literally. The integral lipping device probably served to make the lip uniform and to smooth out the sprue in the threaded area. Whether (the neck portion only) the bottle was turned slightly in the mold before it was released or there was a rotating collar placed onto the neck, I just don't know.

I can see that the more prominent ring had greater surface contact with the mold device, thus, during the twist, was pulled further out of line with the vertical body seam. Traces of that vertical seam are visible below the ring and above, within the spiral thread.

Your bottle seems to represent the next step after the screw-top ground-lip stage of flask development. You can see in this image of a ST GL flask, there is no distortion - no twist - in the vertical seam. The machine that produced your flask eliminated the step of grinding the bottle lip -- a big, money-saving deal!

​

We should re-state the disagreement here. I say that your bottle is a machine bottle, made in an unidentified machine with an integrated lipping device that finished the bottle with a twist. You say that the twist in the vertical seam is a result of fire polishing??

 

[sodetraveler]

We should re-state the disagreement here. I say that your bottle is a machine bottle, made in an unidentified machine with an integrated lipping device that finished the bottle with a twist. You say that the twist in the vertical seam is a result of fire polishing??

Hmmm......while it is of course quite possible that this bottle was made by some new (in 1900) type of bottling machine, shouldn't there be some other examples of this type of bottle out there?

I've never heard of or seen any examples before, nor have I read about any such bottling machine in any of the literature - although I have certainly not read it all! I have seen many a hand blown ketchup bottle with screw threads and an obviosly tooled top above the threads. Are you familiar with these bottles?

The only real difference between these ketchup bottles and my flask is that they have a bit more "clean" area above the first thread. Perhaps if I can firgure out where I have one stored I'll take a picture of it so we can compare it to the flask. No promises on that though, I've got dozens of boxes full of bottles and it might take hours to find one!

Just for clarification, I'm assuming the twist was the result of the lipping tool being applied to the top 1/8" of the lip to clean up the rough area where it was separated from the blow pipe. The tool would have been turned clockwise while the neck was still hot, resulting in a twisting of the neck. As previously stated, this twist is a common feature in tooled bottles.

Perhaps before we agree to disagree though I might make one last observation. I've been using the term "fire polishing" here and - like many terms - I may not have the same definition as you. Case in point: a "tooled" bottle can often be identified by tooling marks on the neck. What happened to the tooling marks on the lip itself? The lips of tooled bottles are most often quite shiney and smooth - shouldn't they also have horizontal tooling marks?

Take a hutchinson sode for example. The tops are beautiful! How did they accomplish that? Well, I suppose that they might have exposed the lip to some additional heat to make it pretty after tooling it. Would this be called fire polishing? Perhaps not, but that's all I've really been referring to. Assuming something like this is done to remove the tooling marks from the lip, that's all I've been suggesting.

Alot of assumptions on my part, but hopefully some of you guys can clear this up a bit for me - at least regarding why tooled lips don't actually have any tooling marks. I really appreciate all the comments so far - this has been a real learning experience. Thanks!

 

[gleaner1]

Harry, nice pic. Essentially, the method to make sodatravellers piece is technically the same as the piece you show, whether machine made or hand blown. We can agree the threads were cast in the mold. I have a few, both machine made, and blown in mold, the later with sheared and fire polished lip, and a nice ground lip amber piece. It would take a while to dig them out for pics. Think fruit jars, most older ones with threads are the blown type with molded threads, and ground lips. The bottom line is, the threads were very rarely if ever tooled, but were formed in the mold proper. So, the threads were not applied, nor tooled, they were molded. In the latter days of blown in mold pieces, the quality of tooling and machining of molds got a lot better, so the mold seam got tighter, better fit, less mold flash around the threads. I would think that it would be very difficult to fire polish out the mold seams of the thread, too expensive and time consuming, and too much risk of deforming the neck.

 

[Harry Pristis]

We should re-state the disagreement here. I say that your bottle is a machine bottle, made in an unidentified machine with an integrated lipping device that finished the bottle with a twist. You say that the twist in the vertical seam is a result of fire polishing??

Hmmm......while it is of course quite possible that this bottle was made by some new (in 1900) type of bottling machine, shouldn't there be some other examples of this type of bottle out there?
...

Just for clarification, I'm assuming the twist was the result of the lipping tool being applied to the top 1/8" of the lip to clean up the rough area where it was separated from the blow pipe. The tool would have been turned clockwise while the neck was still hot, resulting in a twisting of the neck. As previously stated, this twist is a common feature in tooled bottles.

Perhaps before we agree to disagree though I might make one last observation. I've been using the term "fire polishing" here and - like many terms - I may not have the same definition as you. Case in point: a "tooled" bottle can often be identified by tooling marks on the neck. What happened to the tooling marks on the lip itself? The lips of tooled bottles are most often quite shiney and smooth - shouldn't they also have horizontal tooling marks?

Take a hutchinson sode for example. The tops are beautiful! How did they accomplish that? Well, I suppose that they might have exposed the lip to some additional heat to make it pretty after tooling it. Would this be called fire polishing? Perhaps not, but that's all I've really been referring to. Assuming something like this is done to remove the tooling marks from the lip, that's all I've been suggesting.

Alot of assumptions on my part, but hopefully some of you guys can clear this up a bit for me - at least regarding why tooled lips don't actually have any tooling marks. I really appreciate all the comments so far - this has been a real learning experience. Thanks!

It occurred to me earlier today that we might be talking past one another on the meaning of "fire polish." Prior to the advent of sophisticated machines in the late 1800s, fire-polishing was done by sticking the lip of each bottle into the glory-hole on the furnace as a final finishing step. In the process of re-heating the finished lip, sharp edges (and tool marks) could be reduced or obliterated. Most of the wine bottles I collect have fire-polished lips, but not all of them.

​

Here's what I think has happened over the decades: Once lipping tool became bench-mounted, sometimes foot-operated, they could be operated at higher temperatures. As lipping tools became integrated with bottle-making machines, they could operate at very high temperatures. The hotter the lipping tool, the smoother the lip finish. It was a happy evolution for soft-drink bottlers and consumers -- inexpensive bottles you could confidently put to your lips.

I think that Hutchinson bottles, to use your example, were made on these sophisticated machines at high temperature. Could a gas flame be used to keep the lipping tool portion of the machine at a stable temperature? Could be. Would that be considered "fire-polishing"? Not under my conception of the process.

I am not confident that any lipping machine could deflect the vertical seam of your bottle to the left without also affecting the threads. In fact, we can see that the threads were involved. This is evident in the traces (the "sprue") of the vertical seam which are also deflected to the left between the threads. I still argue that the full neck - to the neck ring - was involved in the finishing of the bottle.

I am sure that there were at some point many bottles like yours in circulation. Perhaps there are still many of them in cardboard boxes in storage places. But, I don't have one on my shelf. Perhaps others will post some more images.

 

[sodetraveler]

Thanks guys! This discussion has brought to light a significant amount of information that was previously unclear to me. I appreciate all the help and hopefully the next time I find one of these flasks it will be embossed!!! :-)

Based on evidence gathered from a significant number of both ABM and BIMAL bottles, china and one light bulb found in this layer, I've deduced a date of 1915 for this dump (and flask). Granted this is a bit over-precise for such dating, but to be more general I'd say that everything I've found almost certainly falls into the 1914 to 1917 time frame.

The Waldorf flask found in the same layer is specifically dated 1915 both by embossing on the bottle and the business listing. Coincidentally, both flasks have the same exact body design and both also have white streaks in the glass of the neck. This suggest they might even have been made from the same batch of glass?!??

I'm not sure this adds anything to the conversation, but it certainly doesn't hurt!

 

[wreckvalle]

Image shows lipping tool used to tool non applied tops.

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