Pure, elegant and fragile



Glass bottle - the perfect vessel for beverages, despite their fragility.
Roman historian Pliny the Elder explains that the glass accidentally invented by Phoenician merchants. One day, some traders soda anchored at the mouth of the river Bel (near the modern city of Acre in Israel), and began to cook their own food. And since there were no rocks around, they put it under a pot pieces of soda. "When they burned and mixed with the coastal sand, then poured streams of the new transparent liquid, which was the beginning of the glass


Perhaps this incident was, but not in the Phoenician: here glass has come already in a ready kind. And it is not something invented in Egypt, not like in Mesopotamia, or in both places simultaneously. Mesopotamia was famous by hazy-white glass, the valley of the Nile - by color. The oldest of the currently known glassware - bead green, discovered in Egypt near the ancient city of Thebes. Beads five and a half thousand years. And the oldest preserved glass jar - a cup with a hieroglyphic inscription of the Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose III (1525-1473 BC).
The first capacities made of glass, twirling a hot viscous glass thread on a sack filled with sand, or on the disc of clay. It is clear that the results are far from perfect, and until the middle of the I century BC glassware very successful not enjoy. Everything changed the invention, which today stands glass industry - have learned to blow glass. Now glassblower could give the vessel any shape and size. Mastered then blowing equipment for many subsequent centuries has not changed. This is clearly seen on stored in the Archaeological Museum in Split (Croatia) relief, relating to the beginning of AD.
Apparently, blowing glass started in the Phoenician. In any case, after 64 years prior to BC, when the Romans annexed this area, glassware begins with incredible speed to spread throughout the Roman Empire. Greek writer Strabo in 19 Century BC testified: "In Rome, many invented on glass, so that you can buy a cheap one drinking vessels."


Since that time we can speak about the phenomenon of the bottle. Roman artisans at once began to produce dozens of species. And a variety of sizes: embalmers and perfumers required little ampules, the innkeeper and wine merchants - huge bottles. Consumers suddenly realized how important it is to see what to buy. "Let the eyes try too!" - Exclaimed the Roman poet Horace.
The word "bottle" goes back to the colloquial Latin buttis - a term that gained currency in Gaul at the end of the Roman Empire. But approved the word is not in full uniform, and in the diminutive, affectionate - buticula, "bottle".
The earliest bottles were similar to the bulb - it is a form of taking a hot glass bubble at the end of the tube glassblower. But such vessels were inconvenient to store, put on his side, and soon acquired a bottle familiar to us an elongated shape with a narrow neck. In the first two centuries AD of production of bottles in Rome reached a magnitude that Europe could again only in the nineteenth century.
Rome exported bottles across the Old World: they are in the area from Scandinavia to the Far East. It was a real industry with the division of labor among the masters, in factory conditions that produce huge volumes of raw glass, and glass blowers who worked in small workshops. Very soon the streets of Roman cities began to appear poor, collecting broken bottles for sale in the remelt.
Only in the XVII century glassmakers learned to do more or less uniform bottlenecks, so that they could clog traffic jams. And in 1630-ies Englishman Kenelm Digby, who owned a glass factory, invented a special bottle. Its walls were thicker and stronger and darker than the glass: the wine in a bottle is better preserved and ripened. By the way, without this invention it would be impossible to establish broad production of champagne that had appeared in France a little later - in 1668. The barrel, which then transported the wines were not good for sparkling drink containing carbon dioxide under pressure: they may explode. A unique wine from the Champagne region started to spread around the world, only after it in 1728, King Louis XV of France authorized to carry champagne bottles in the form of exclusion.