Mold Seams
There are a lot of different ways of "dating" a bottle. I'm going to touch on a few of the most common ones. One of the most common ways to date a bottle is by noting how far the mold seam goes up the bottle. The mold seam is the line made by the mold in which the bottle was formed. Almost all bottles manufactured after 1860 have a mold seam. Before then bottles were made with a blowpipe using what's known as the "free blown method". In either process, the lip of the bottle was formed after the body of the bottle and then applied to the bottle. A lot of bottles made after 1890 were machine made and did not have the "applied lip". On those bottles the seam runs the entire length of the bottle (see fig. 1).
Another common way of dating bottles is by the the way the top or lip is manufactured. There are as many lip/top formations as there are bottles. I will attempt to show you some of the most common and easiest to identify.
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