Using google lens to identify an object

 Down at Lake View today I came across this

basically it's a cane covered glass bottle with some weird apparatus on top and the inscription 'By Royal letters patent No. 2'.

I knew I'd seen one before somewhere and had an idea that it might be something to do with soda, as in aerated water, but I was absolutely buggered if I could remember where and what.

So, I pasted the image into Google Lens to do an image search, and it came back with two results, one from the PowerHouse Museum in Sydney, and one from the Sparklets Collector's site - apparently there are people out there who collect old soda syphons.

Crucially the Sparklets Collectors site mentioned that the P01/WK model, made from 1897 to 1913 could have either By Royal Letters Patent No.2 or No.5, as in the PowerHouse museum examples.

Incredibly useful and undoubtedly saved me a bit of head scratching.

I'd previously used Google lens once or twice to help identify the source of an image, and have been impressed by its image finding capabilities, but I'm doubly impressed by the effectiveness of this slightly left field technique to identify artefacts ...