Here is the story of soda bottle available in Goa were known as “Guddechi Baatli”
Do you still recollect having “Limbu Soda” on the “Gaddo” around down town, they used to use those typical Codd-neck bottles or the “Guddechi baatli” or rather call it Marble Soda Bottles, I used to love that sound of “POP” when they used to pop up the marble on the bottleneck with their thumb and pour the soda into the glass. I still feel very nostalgic when I see the pictures of those bottles. It was very easy to open no opener required and they were very inexpensive. You may still remember the ‘experts’ in the art of opening this bottle – they could lengthen the duration of the hiss by controlling the pressure on the marble as it dislodged.
But do you know where they have diapered subsequently? And from where they were originated? Do still people use those bottles around somewhere? Let’s try to find some facts related to these “MARBEL-SODA-BOTTLES”
According to the available information these bottles were been in use when the crown caps were not invented. The Marble-Soda-Bottle known as “Ramune” in Japan were widely known for its distinctive design, often called Codd-neck bottles which was named after the inventor, Hiram Codd. (Hiram Codd was an English engineer. In 1872, he patented a bottle filled under gas pressure which pushed a marble against a rubber washer in the neck, creating a perfect seal.) The codd head marble is held in place by the pressure of the carbonation in the drink. To open the bottle, a device to push the marble inward is provided. The marble is pushed inside the neck of the bottle where it rattles around while drinking. Therefore, the drinks are sometimes called “marble soda”
Although it needed some practice to drink the soda directly from the bottle as people trying for the first time often find it difficult to drink, as it needed a practice to learn to stop the marble from blocking the flow. But it still had its own charm and style which perhaps we all miss.
Today the Codd bottles have nearly vanished. But according to the last available information only one Khandelwal Glass Works in India and another company in Japan are believed to be the last two surviving manufacturers of this relic. Sightings of the Codd bottle have now become rare in Goa. But I have managed to get some pics which will give you the idea of its existence.
Though it is not available anymore in Goa but it is still in fashion in places like Mumbai, Pune, Nashik & Daman in India. Whichever direction you drive out of Mumbai in – whether for Nashik, Pune or Daman – you will find an occasional but welcome sight of a road-side vendor selling Goti soda (that is what it is known as in these places) and oftentimes you will find quite a few cars parked and having their share of the soda. The Goti soda was available in all major cities until some years back. For some reasons these bottles are now banned from most cities, and pushed outside of the cities’ periphery, since they can apparently used as weapons…but these highway-side sellers still keep the tradition alive.
There is another story related to this POP soda bottles which I had discovered in my readings on this subject according to that before the invention Codd-neck-bottles the carbonated water were created on the spot at soda fountains where they were mixed with the syrups and flavorings . If the customer wished to enjoy the drink later, he or she was out of luck.
It was in the mid of1800s, some manufacturers began bottling their ginger ales and fruit drinks in ceramic jugs or glass bottles, using a cork for a stopper tied down with wire like a champagne cork to hold in the carbonation. This worked well enough, unless the cork dried out and lost its seal. Some early bottlers such as Schweppes made their bottles with round bottoms, so that they must be stored on their sides, keeping the cork moist. This is the origin of the classic bowling pin shaped bottle as still used by San Pellegrino.
But since the cork stoppers were expensive for bottling. Sometimes unscrupulous bottlers purchased previously-used champagne corks scavenged from bars to seal their sodas. And sealing the corks with wire was a time-consuming process that added to the cost of the soda. Throughout the last part of the 1800s, inventors came up with hundreds of new designs for soda bottle stoppers to replace the old-fashioned cork. There were wire cages, swinging bale stoppers, locking clasps, metal stoppers sealed by giant magnets, rubber gaskets, tin strips and foil seals.
In 1873 British inventor Hiram Codd came up with this unusual bottle design where a glass marble is placed inside the bottle when it is cast. The soda is bottled upside down, so that the marble falls against ring in the neck of the bottle, where the pressure of the carbonated gas inside holds the marble in place. When the consumer wishes to drink, he or she presses down on the marble with a wooden plunger, releasing the pressure with a pronounced POP! When the bottle is tipped, the marble rolls into a narrow trough out of the way so that the liquid can pour out.
These bottles were intended to be returned to the factory to be used again, but no doubt many were broken by children to retrieve the colorful marble inside. With so many contours and narrow corners, this bottle seems as if it would be difficult to wash and re-use but despite these limitations, the Codd stopper bottle and its imitators became the most widely used in England and Australia. In America most bottlers preferred the Hutchinson stopper, a rubber and wire plunger inside the bottle sealed by the pressurized liquid in a similar way.
Then in 1892 William Painter invented with the bottle stopper that we still know today: the crown cap. The cork-lined bottle cap was such an improvement in cost, ease of opening, and quality control that within several years it was the standard for all soda bottling, although the Codd stopper continued for several decades longer in Europe, America, Japan & India.
In Japan and India however, these Codd stopper bottles are still used today for cheap local fruit-flavored soft drinks. In Japan they are called ramune, while in India they are known as bante wali botal, or “bottle with a marble”. Nowadays the Japanese bottles are mass-produced and not as well designed to trap the marble when pouring, but they still open the same way, with the sound that gave soda its name: POP!
