Now You See It, Now You Don't!
TellzAll's subject for May is the Bottle Cap
Although carbonated soda water has roots that go back to the early 1800s, the process of bottling sodas, also known as soda pop or pop, took much longer to develop. The greatest challenge to early bottlers of carbonated beverages was how to keep their products from going "flat" or losing the bubbles. Sodas contain bubbles of carbon dioxide that make them fizzy. Think about what happens if you pour a soda into a glass and let it sit for several hours—your drink loses the bubbles, and often it does not taste as good as it did when you first poured it. Bottlers in the 1800s faced the same dilemma. Unfortunately, most of their early attempts to solve the problem met with failure, as the caps either made their product taste bad or leaked soda and/or carbon dioxide because they did not seal properly.
William Painter, a resident of Baltimore, Maryland, patented the first successfully designed bottle cap in 1892. It was known as the crown bottle cap because its shape looked similar to a king’s crown. The bottle cap was also known as the crown cork, as the inside of the metal bottle cap was lined with a thin piece of cork that helped the cap to seal tightly to the bottle. This design became so popular that it soon dominated the bottling industry, not only in the United States but also in many other parts of the world.
Over time, the bottle cap's design underwent some changes. Early bottle caps were made of plain steel but, in the second half of the twentieth century, improved manufacturing processes introduced tinplate or chromium-plated sheet metal. The original cork linings have been replaced with plastic seals instead. Bottlers recognized that bottle caps could be used as additional advertising for the product and, as a result, caps were painted with a variety of different product logos.
In the last few decades of the twentieth century, new bottling techniques reduced the number of bottle caps used in the soft drink industry. First aluminum cans and then plastic bottles were introduced as alternative to glass bottles with metal caps. Still, there are some companies that use glass bottles and the modern version of the bottle cap to market their products. The crown bottle cap is still used around the world for both soft drinks and beer.
There are many people, both in the United States and in other countries, who collect old bottle caps. They have formed a number of organizations that focus attention on their hobby, including the Crowncap Collectors Society International. In addition to those people who collect bottle caps from different types of soft drinks and beers, there are some artists who have chosen to use these colorful objects in their work as well.
