Today a discussion of the misadventures of Matt Johannes's soda pop bottles. I mean, if he indeed sold all the soda in Eau Claire Wisconsin between roughly 1865 and the early 1880s, then any pop bottle that caused a problem in that time was one of his!
Because the beverage is carbonated, soda bottles have thick walls. They also need a secure, solid seal, and this technology was changing rapidly in the 19th century.
The first bottles used by Matt Johannes were no doubt "blob top" sodas. This one is a bit later but they were the only game in town in the 1860s. These sealed with a simple cork, usually held in with either a wire bale or just some string. This particular style is probably what was being delivered in 1879 when Johannes received "14,400 new pop bottles.......which is only an addition to the immense number he had already on hand."*
Next up was the so called "Gravitating stopper" soda. This had a glass plunger and a rubber gasket. You pushed down on it, dropping the plunger, and likely assorted dust and stuff, down into your beverage. Invented in the late 1860s they were somewhat common in the 1870s.
Finally in the early 1880s the "Hutchinson" soda came along and took over the market. Yes, this is from a different, later Eau Claire bottler but the ones used by Johannes are simply embossed on the base:
MJ
EC
Note the wire bale in the bottom of this one. It had a rubber gasket in it but one that could be pushed only part way into the bottle. More sanitary. Possibly resealable. Sometimes it fell in anyway. Presumably this type were the "self sealing bottles" that Johannes purchased in such a large batch in 1885.**
The poor fellow in this July 1878 news article would have been holding either a blob soda or a gravitator from Matt Johannes:
"M. Homs, proprietor of the Union Saloon, on the North side, was severely injured by the explosion of a pop bottle Wednesday evening, a piece of the glass striking him between the eyes and making an ugly gash from with the blood flowed profusely. Pop is an innocent beverage but it is sometimes dangerous to those handling it."
A similar report involving a Mr. T.M. Jacobson says that while he was "drawing a cork from a pop bottle" he sustained a deep gash that will "..prevent Mr. Jacobson from use of the hand for a time."
Those stories had injury, but the next one perhaps just insult. It dates to January of 1881, a time in which either old stock of blob and gravitator bottles or less convincingly the new fangled Hutchinson sodas could have been at fault...
EXPLOSION AT EAU CLAIRE
"There is no place up north where the people are more excitable, and more easily thrown into a panic than at Eau Claire. For years they have lived an exciting life. They have had the Dells light, freshlets, and a booming business, fires and revivals, until people are expecting all the time that something is going to happen. On New Years Eve there was a dance at the Opera House, and the bright gas shown o'er fair women and brave men, and over two hundred hearts beat happy. They had a bar at one end of the room, where innocent drinks such as pop and small beer were sold. There was a man named Schilling who was the caterer and it was his job to furnish the refreshments. About nine o'clock, when the dancers were just getting warmed up, the pop run out, and he went downstairs after another box of the beverage. He had handled pop for years, and had never met with any accident, and he had become careless and inured to danger. As he reached the top stair with the bottles before him, one of the bottles exploded, and the cork struck him on the underside of his nose. "Kritz Dunnerwetter" said he in French, and he dropped the box on the stairs, took his nose in both hands, and as another bottle exploded and struck him in the stomach he fell over backward and rolled down the stairs, the bottles following him fizzing soda water up his trouser legs, down his neck, and all around, and a bottle exploding on every stair and sending consternation amongst his vitals. He got to the bottom of the stairs a little ahead of the box, and yelled "murder", "fire" and a few such things, then ran up the stairs into the hall, bleeding from every pore. The dancers heard the explosions and women fainted, while others clung tight to their partners for protection, and one girl opened a window and tried to climb down the lighting rod. When Schilling came in covered with blood, the terror was intensified until he explained that the soda water was at the bottom of it."
Unfortunately for my little tale, this article seems to have been written entirely tongue in cheek, but the hazards of exploding bottles were real, and well known enough to make a yarn that convinced me to the very end.
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*Was 14,400 the standard order size? It would be 1,200 dozen. Could that mention of a massive 144,000 order a few years later have been a typo?
** Note that this bottle has a wire fastener of the "Hutchinson" style in it. Older bottle types were often retrofitted and kept in service.
