Squat cylinder wine bottle

[PalmettoPride]

Found this past summer in a river near Columbia, SC. I was wading a sandbar when the river was low looking for native american pottery & there it was, lying on the bottom in the sand.

 

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[ARC]

great find.

 

[yakker]

Nice old English bottle! Got a bit of a beating in the river, no? (I would love to find a bottle that old- seriously) HH! Yakker

 

[PalmettoPride]

Yeah it's been sandblasted for sure but I'm not complaining. It's pretty cool that it survised in the river without breaking.

 

[unclemac]

it got all roughed up but never broke, tough old dog...what is the date?

 

[PalmettoPride]

I was told somewhere between 1760 and 1780.

 

[sandchip]

Heck yes! Great find for walking the bar.

 

[unclemac]

nothing that old where I am, real nice find.

 

[tigerbeetle]

Very nice. ... Do NOT machine tumble back to smooth. Classic as it is. Graphite or open pontil??

 

[PalmettoPride]

Very nice. ... Do NOT machine tumble back to smooth. Classic as it is. Graphite or open pontil??

How can I tell the difference?

 

[unclemac]

Very nice. ... Do NOT machine tumble back to smooth. Classic as it is. Graphite or open pontil??

why?...afraid to damage it?....like the look?...or de-value it?

 

[Bass]

That's a great bottle you found. It's old and has lots of character. Thanks for sharing it with us

 

[CoilyGirl]

Wow,what a find!

 

[PalmettoPride]

Thanks everybody!

 

[Harry Pristis]

Very nice find. The date of 1760 - 80 is reasonable.

These bottles typically were finished using neither an "open" pontil rod (blowpipe used as a pontil rod) nor a "graphite" pontil rod (a bare iron rod). Such bottles were usually finished using a "sand pontil" which employed crushed glass, sand, or even crushed furnace clinker as a separating medium.

The misleading term "graphite pontil" has fallen out of use -- there is no graphite involved with an iron pontil scar. A somewhat better term for bare iron pontil is "improved pontil," a qualitative term perhaps for marketing purposes back when it was introduced.

Bare iron empontilling was a mid-19th century development (Van den Bossche give 1830 as the date of widespread introduction) which substantially postdates this bottle.

Tumble-polishing such a bottle is strictly a subjective preference. I don't think it would hurt this bottle in any way.

​

 

[PalmettoPride]

The pontil scar

 

[BENTHOR]

...

 

[sunrunner]

most likely an open pontil.

 

[Harry Pristis]

Looks like a standard sand pontil scar. There should be tiny grit adhering to the bottle bottom which you can feel easier than see. The grit serves as a stand-off, preventing the iron rod from bonding with the glass over a large surface area (as with a bare iron pontil). The bottle is broken away from the rod along this weak boundary which consists of a fused scatter of grit.

This technique was so successfully employed in Late 18th and Early 19th Century Britain that it is often only detected by a few tiny adherent specks of grit on the bottom of the bottle.

 

[PalmettoPride]

Great info-thanks Harry.