Ruby Glass bottle

Lori

This bottle was dug in approx. 1970 on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. It has no markings at all and the seam only runs half way to the lip. The fellow who gifted it to me was an avid digger and said he believed it was a medicine bottle made with colloidal gold. I've been searching for years for a value for this item, can any one help me?

historic

Shape-wise, this looks a lot like a Hall's Hair Renewer.

If it had some embossing on it, this would be a home run. With no embossing, it is hard to say - perhaps $50 or so, but ideally I would want see much clearer photos or hold it in my hand to get a better sense for the age of the bottle.

I am simply unaware of brilliant ruby red glass in 19th century bottles - you do see earlier 20th century bottles (and some 19th century glass) so this is a real oddity.

Yes, gold is used to create the red color.

BobB

I'm not a bottle collector or a chemist but a couple points, please: your picture may be distorting the color but I do not see ruby-red, & the mass-production bottle-making industry ordinarily does not use ingredients that raise their production costs, so gold oxide is very unlikely. The stories of gold/ruby glass can be found in most every book about glassmaking but various shades of red glass can be made with other less costly chemicals added to the batch. I believe copper is one such but not the only one. But read between the lines in these gold/ruby stories; this expensive glass was invented in glassworks patronized by some king or czar and the ruby-red output was one-of-a-kind works of art destined for the tables of princes and wealthy bankers & merchants. Utility glass through the ages has come in shades of brown, green, olive, amber or blue for 2 simple & related reasons: natural impurities left in the sand or other components of the batch produced color shades by accident, which when understood by glass chemists, were added in greater quantities on purpose to increase the color's intensity. Natural iron found in most sand deposits produces a wide range of greens & browns; cobalt -- derived as a by-product of mining copper -- produced rich blue in glass & pottery glazes nearly a millenium ago. Because bottles are humble utilitarian wares necessarily cheaply made, it is difficult to imagine a glassworks inflating its production costs by 50%-100% to make its bottles ruby red, -- to what advantage? It certainly is a wonderfully attractive red bottle, sure to attract attention sitting on the barber shop shelf, but it doesn't have to be gold ruby to turn heads.

historic

Bob

As always, very good points.

I did find a ruby glass recipe without gold in Recipes for Flint Glass Making on pg. 4 of the book, pg. 15 of the pdf.

Chris