Page 19 - Pharmacy History 23 July 2004

COLLECTIBLES
Medicine Bottles
by Geoff Miller
Digging up bottles from old rubbish tips may seem an odd hobby, but it can be a profitable one too.
One of the great underground movements of the past 50 years or
so has been the bottle diggers. In the depths of the night they beaver away
in old rubbish dumps looking for somebody’s trash that they can turn into treasure.
Digging for bottles or other collectables is not easy as there are risks involved and quite a number of diggers have lost their lives when their holes caved in or they have been chased off sites by angry guard dogs.
Finding the right tip is also very difficult as many of the old sites that were used for dumping rubbish, have themselves been redeveloped or covered with concrete for car parking. But sometimes one can be very lucky and turn up a real find in the mud and slush or crumbling ashes of an old municipal tip
The three bottles pictured are among the top prizes awaiting the brave diggers as they are extremely rare and hence much sought after by collectors.
From the left of the picture ( Fig 1),
the first bottle bears the trade-mark for Raddam’s Microbe Killer. This was a quaint “quack cure” patented by William Raddams in 1887 and the embossing
on the bottle reads GERM BACTERIA OR FUNGUS DESTROYER, and in the central shield depicts a man beating a skeleton.
This bottle when cleaned, sold at a recent auction in the UK for $AUD 770.
The middle example is a large green glass bottle embossed Handysides Consumption Cure. The rarity of this bottle is due to the colour and the size as the product enjoyed a wide reputation, and was sold in different sizes and glass colours.
At a recent auction, this bottle brought $AUD 2850,
The third bottle contained Warner’s Safe Cure, a product made by Hubert Harrington Warner, an American who built a world wide patent medicine empire, and Warner’s bottles in a wide variety of colours, size and trademarking, have a huge following of collectors who specialise in ‘Warner, Cures’, Auction price $AUD 1700.
It is fair to add that the prices quoted above are for examples that are in very good condition without too many chips or other flaws, and the bottles are at the top end of their market.. Bottles are no longer relegated to a dusty window ledge but are found in glass cabinets in high income homes, and values will continue to rise as the collector base has broadened so much.
Fig 2.
Fig 1.
Fig 3.
How to date a bottle ( A rough Guide)
1640s-1800: Crudely made, usually in “black glass” which is actually often dark brown or green in colour.
Early 1800s: Early moulded bottles. Look for model marks or seams up both sides and around the shoulders.
1870-1880: Pontilled clear glass and aqua glass bottles. These have very rough bases where the bottle was broken off the pontil rod during manufacture.
1870-1900: Smooth-based bottles with a seam up both sides, but stopping at the lip. 1900 onwards: Machine-made. The glass is usually thinner and the shape very uniform.
Seams run up through lip.
(From the “Little Bottler-Oct/Nov 2001, The Newsletter of the Colonial Bottle & Collectors Club of WA Inc.)
volume 2 ■ no 24 ■ November 2004
Pharmacy History Australia ■ 19