Anyone have any info on these bottles? History? Found In NZ

[thehobbyistsociety]

Found one at an op shop, the other two I dug out of an old jetty

 

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[Red-Coat]

Welcome to Tnet

I can help a bit on the Clements Tonic bottle. You will see the same bottle in several Australian provincial museum collections, often with a stated believed date range from circa 1848 to 1950 (as below for example) but that’s completely wrong.

https://victoriancollections.net.au/items/4f72b54797f83e0308604f60

For starters, the discoverer/inventor of this tonic (Frederick Moore Clements) was born in 1859, the tonic wasn’t formulated until 1880, wasn’t in manufacture before 1886, and not on a fully commercial scale until 1894. I believe only the early embossed bottles have the “remains the property of…” indication and later bottles had a paper label on a non-embossed bottle. I would put yours somewhere in the region of 1890-1905 or thereabouts.

Clements was born in Warwickshire, England and apprenticed to a chemist in Birmingham. He formulated the tonic during a working visit to Port Elizabeth in South Africa in 1880 where he met another English pharmacist by the name of T.B. Melhuish and followed him to Sydney to work in his pharmacy. After passing qualifying exams in Australia in 1884, he opened his own pharmacy shop two years later, manufacturing “Clements Tonic” on a small scale in competition with a similar product made by his former employer Melhuish. He sold the pharmacy in 1894 and opened a factory next door to his home in the Stanmore suburb of Sydney, making the tonic and other products. In 1905, he sold most of his interests to Elliott Bros Ltd, incorrectly believing that he retained certain rights to the name.

The product was essentially a ‘galenical’ cocktail of vitamins and minerals (made from natural ingredients including herbs) and, largely through better marketing strategy, was much more successful than the competing Melhuish product. It was widely advertised as a splendid cure for many ailments – “Nervous Breakdown in particular” – and saw use in hospitals and sanatoria for its perceived usefulness in general health and wellbeing improvement.

Its big moment came during the Influenza pandemic of the early 1890s. Clements shrewdly took out scaremongering advertisements in regional newspapers which were in editorial style such that they might be mistaken for new reports. Here’s a typical example, which was headlined “The Influenza Epidemic”:

The inluenza is raging again this year with unprecedented deadliness. The paralysing influences of this terrible malady have assumed the alarming dimensions of a plague.
The distemper is of a powerfully destructive character and shatters its victims with fearful suddenness. The severity of the visitation eclipses all previous attacks.
The medical faculty fails to account for the outbreak, and is powerless to control its spread. Doctors, nurses, and hospitals are doing everything possible for sufferers, but are overwhelmed by the multitude crying bitterly for relief.
A despatch from one town states that 300 people died in one day; this was about the daily average, and the streets were crowded with vehicles carrying the dead to their last resting place; and the sad vacancy of death depressed every household.
Such trying times as these demand immediate attention. The doctors fail, and the many advertised cough and cold cures are only sedatives which interfere with the proper secretions of the respiratory tract.
Recourse must be had to a genuine stimulating restorative, which whilst curing his grip, will also strengthen and support the patient, and no article the world has so far seen can compare to Clements Tonic for these effects.
During the great outbreak of influenza in Sydney, in 1890, over 50,000 bottles of Clements Tonic were consumed and its praises were sung in every quarter, as the disease was completely stamped out by the use of this remedy in four weeks.
Such facts as this prove beyond the doubt of the most unbelieving sceptic, the value of Clements Tonic for such diseases.

It’s still made today… but doesn’t work against Coronavirus!

 

[islamoradamark]

Welcome from Florida

 

[kblackfoto]

thanks so much!!! very informative I love it great read