Hey all, I'm gonna start off by saying I know nothing about glass but dug up some bottles in my back yard and really want to know more about them. The following is just repeating what I found after maybe two hours of digging on the internet. Take it with a pound of salt.
As a quick summary of what I'm looking for:
Identify the rectifier, and if possible what was in the bottle. Rectifier permit is 666.I'm tentatively dating them to 1937 but I'm not sure. This area was officially unsettled until the early 1950s and was just sand dunes before then. Unofficially it's known that people used to live out here in (sometimes elaborate) makeshift houses, and the city just pretended it didn't exist.
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I dug these up in California at a depth of about 13 inches. They both appear to be the same type of bottle, but one is pretty broken so I can't be 100% sure.
On the bottom of the bottle, in raised text:
Top: 85 MG 7Bottom: R-666On the right side each has a single digit rotated 90 degrees to the right; one is 3 and the other is 5.
The body of the bottle is curved in an arc, kinda like a banana shape if you look at it from one end.
At the top of the bottle near the neck, we have "HALF PINT" written horizontally on what I'll refer to as the "front". The text is raised, inside a rectangle sunken into the glass. On the top and bottom there are four squares of raised glass, aligned to each other so that it looks like these are stripes interrupted by the text. The front is otherwise smooth.
On the back there's the "Federal law forbids..." warning. The text is in an arc, also stamped into a sunken rectangle, with raised squares above it. Below the text, however, unlike the front, the raised glass stripes extend about halfway down the bottle. There's a blank space, and at the very bottom an equal number of short raised rectangles and aligned such that the overall effect appears to be long stripes running down the bottle that were interrupted.
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Here's what I've figured out so far:
The 85 is a liquor bottle permit number for Maywood Glass, further confirmed by the MG logo. (Source)The bottom R-666 is the rectifier number. I have no idea what company this is for, so if anyone knows I'd greatly appreciate it.
As for the date:
Our definite upper bound is 1959, because that's when Maywood was acquired. I found the text of the law requiring the "federal law forbids" warning published in 1949, and it explicitly says that the year must be two digits. We know that the 7 and the 3 can't mean 1973 because Maywood didn't exist, so that means there's a one-digit year. This paper says in or before 1940 Maywood started using two-digit years for liquor, so I'm guessing 1940 is our upper bound.The "federal law forbids" warning requirement went into effect in 1935, so that's our lower bound.
Overall, this means our time range is 1935 to 1940. The rotated numbers on the right (3 and 5) are unlikely to be the year because federal law went into effect in 1935. My guess is that 7 is the year (1937) and the rotated numbers indicate the mold. My only hesitancy with this is my house was built in 1952 and this area was mostly sand dunes before that.
Again, I'm just barfing up what I've read over the last two hours.
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Thanks to anyone that can help!
