Those Marvellous Machines

Its looks defy its capacity, but this odd-looking contraption was at one stage Wimmers sole bottle capper.

How did it work? An operator would fill the bottle, place the cap in the machine, pull the lever and push the foot pedal - voila! One capped bottle of Wimmers softdrink.

Nothing remarkable about that until you realise that there was only one machine for the whole operation and that meant only one person working it. But what is perhaps truly amazing is that the operator could cap 60 bottles a minute. That's one a second!

Torpedo Bottles

This was the torpedo type hand blown bottle, which was first used for soft drinks in the early 1800's. But why would you make a bottle you can't set down?

B Williams who created the iconic, and sadly now gone, House of Bottles in Noosa, knows the answer:

"The bottles were originally a greenish colour, which was achieved by putting soda in the glass when it was made, later they were clear and I think they used magnesium to achieve that. And the reason they were shaped like a torpedo was so that the cork remained moist. Originally, flat bottom bottles of soft drink would come by ship from England and by the time they arrived they'd have gone flat or had leaked.

B also says that there were small stands for holding the unfinished bottles upright.

Marble Sealed Bottles

Long before screw caps, there were marble sealed bottles.