	Method of Manufacture		Condition Terms
	Dating		Glass Colors
	Grading Condition		Bottle Cleaning

Dating (by Method of Manufacture)

Mold seams, or the lack thereof, are often the key to dating bottles. The earliest bottles were free-blown and have no visible seams. These bottles also have one of several different types of pontils on the base, where a rod was attached to hold the bottle while finishing the top. Free blowing was the method used to produce bottles from shortly before the time of Christ until the early 19th century. The very earliest form of glass container making, the sand core process, predates glass blowing by over a dozen centuries. There are exceptions to the “no seam” rule, such as wine bottles blown late in the 19th century that were “turned” while in the mold, effectively wiping away the seams. Evidence of such turning can be found in horizontal striations on the surface of the glass.

The first molds widely used in utilitarian glass blowing formed just the body of the bottle and are referred to as “dip” molds. These were used in the late 18th century. Full molds, which formed the body as well as neck and shoulders, came into popular use in the first half of the19th century and ushered in the standardization of bottle capacities. The first were “three piece” molds, which formed the body of the bottle in a cylinder and the shoulder and neck in two halves. Later, “two piece” molds formed the entire bottle in two molded halves. The seams on these bottles disappear when they reach the lip or collar or even below that point. This is because the seam was covered up by either a hand applied lip or collar, or in later bottles, was hand “tooled” out of a lip that was formed in the mold.

The next landmark in the bottle making industry occurred in 1903 when the fully automatic bottle machine was invented. This marked the beginning of the end of handcrafted bottles for popular use. By 1920 the automatic bottle machine dominated the industry in America. Therefore, as a general rule, utilitarian bottles with evidence of hand blowing (no seam through lip) can effectively be dated pre 1920. There are exceptions to this rule, particularly in other countries where the bottle machine was slow to take root and didn’t fully over-take hand blowing until the 30’s. The key difference between machine and hand-blown bottles is that the seam on machine bottles continues through the side of the lip or collar and over the top. If a bottle has an external screw top that is also an excellent indicator that it was machine made. A small number of the earliest screw tops were hand blown in a mold and can be identified by their ground tops.

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