Uncork These Facts
Sunday
Bottles are old. The first ceramic bottles go back 5,500 years to ancient Mesopotamia, but the first glass bottles started about 1500 BC in the same general area. About 1,000 years later, glass blowing began there too.
Monday
The oldest message in a bottle found was at sea for 131 years, 233 days old when discovered in January 2018 in Australia. It was one of many bottles dropped by German ships between 1864 and 1933 as part of research into currents and shipping lanes, and the note asked the finder to return it to the German Sea Observatory or closest German embassy with info on where it was found.
Tuesday
Unfortunately, not all bottles in the ocean are quite as historic and desirable, since plastic bottles are the third most common form of trash found in the ocean.
Wednesday
The idea of a genie (“jinn”) in a lamp or bottle goes back thousands of years to “Arabian Nights,” but the saying “the genie is out of the bottle,” referring to a thing which cannot be undone, only became common in the 1960s.
Thursday
The dent in the bottom of wine bottles is called a “punt” and goes back to when the bottles were made by glassblowers rather than modern machines. Bottoms were pushed in to keep the bottles upright and may have added strength, but today remain as a vestige of the old tradition.
Friday
These days, when a bottle is recycled, it is typically melted down and made into a new bottle. However, thorough cleaning, relabeling, and reuse of the same bottle used to be the norm, and still is in many countries.
Saturday
In the decades between widespread use of the wine bottle cork and an effective corkscrew, the cork had to stick out of the bottle to be grasped for removal. Before the cork, bottles were sealed with oily rags, among other things.