Codd bottles

 Codd, or Codd neck bottles were a Victorian invention.

Invented by one Hiram Codd they were a stunningly simple design  - a thick glass bottle with a rubber washer and a marble in the neck. The marble was pressed against the washer by the internal pressure of the the aerated drink inside - aerated drinks were very much a Victorian thing as well, in part due to the temperance movement - to make a seal. A special pointy opener would push the marble down allowing to contents to be poured into a glass.

1915 Codd Bottle - Orbost Historical society

Codd bottles were in common use in Australia but relatively few have survived  due to children breaking the necks of the bottles to get at the marble inside.

Recently, when gardening, I found a small glass 1cm diameter sphere, which I assumed was probably a child's marble that had been lost.

Having spent some time trawling the web, I'm not so sure. Victorian children's marbles were usually either coloured pottery or patterned glass rather than plain glass.

However marbles obtained by smashing the necks are usually plain blue green glass, like the marble I found.

This is where I start getting all hand wavy.

Our house was not built until around 1880, and it's said - I havn't delved into this in detail - that prior to this the land our block and neighbouring blocks are on was an orchard and that Billson's brewery (which is less than 100m from our house and directly opposite on Last Street) would sometimes stable their horses there. Certainly I've found a discarded horseshoe and a set of broken nineteenth century farrier's pliers while gardening so perhaps there's some truth in the story.

There's also quite a lot of broken nineteenth century glass in the soil. I havn't found a complete recognisable nineteenth century bottle, so I don't know if the brewery also used the vacant land as a dumping ground for broken bottles, or whether they just ended up there by chance, or from the householders dumping broken bottles in the garden.

However, I did find an example online of Billson's brewery using Codd bottles for aerated drinks

which again is made of the same blue green glass that the marble I found.

So, still furiously waving my hands, I'm going to hypothesize that the marble came from a Codd bottle from the brewery. Whether it got there by being dumped in a pile of brewery waste, or whether a child smashed the neck of a bottle to get the marble sometime at the end of the Victorian era, is something we'll never know ...