Found on one of my digs. Could that be true??

Rean.c

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Dec 4, 2014
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Circa 1880-1900 liquor flask, the number on the bottom is a mold number, each mold has a number when a mold wears out a new one with a different number is used. It is blown in mold instead of completely machine made so it is an older bottle. That style of flask is called a "coffin", popular from the time above I mentioned. Still a nice old bottle, it would look great cleaned up on a shelf.

As you can see there is quite a difference between your bottle and a 1600's bottle, clear glass was not even invented until the 1880's.
View attachment 1094982
Coinman123,

What if I found a bottle with no number on it at all? That appears to be the same age


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An old bottle with no mold number is really no different from one with a mold number if it is an unembossed bottle. There is no real way to tell much about it by that number on the base. Embossing or a paper label will tell you a lot which will help date the bottle but for generic bottles, the seam line, type of pontil scar, type of lip etc is what dates the bottle.
 

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Interesting find I have never seen a lip finish like this one on a flask. The lip finish looks a lot like the lips on English ale bottles. I would love to see what this bottle looks like cleaned up.
 

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What if I found a bottle with no number on it at all? That appears to be the same age


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Same age as the first one you found, a lot of glass making companies did not use mold number, it all depends on the bottle.
 

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The base numbers generally are the glass manufacturers model number etc. There are glass insulators with 1678 on the skirt as the only marking, in a similar script and are believed to be Canadian in origin. Like it was mentioned applied lips like that generally date to the 1880s/90s era although some small glass makers no doubt used outdated manufacturing methods, so sometimes dating can be more a range than anything.
A pretty cool bottle over all! Soaking in either lye or toilet cleaner containing hydrochloric acid can really clean the bottle up, just be careful!
 

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Nice coffin flask. Thought I would throw in a little info. Your flask looks like it has an applied lip. There is a difference between an applied lip and a applied tooled lip. By the mid 1880's applied lip finishes had been phased out by applied tooled lip finishes because they had a cleaner more uniform look. It wasn't until around 1910 and into the teens the most of the bottles were machine made. If you look at the 1903 Owens glass catalog about 95 percent of the bottles they were making were still blown and only a few were machine made.
Wolverine.
 

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Once all of the soil, etc is removed from the inside, a tablespoon of sand, a squirt of dish soap and half filled with water will help.
"Shaken, not stirred."
Rinse, repeat.

Best,

Scott
 

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