Horlick's Malted Milk Jar

In this post, I'm going to talk about the aqua glass Horlick's Malted Milk jar/bottle that I dug up a few weeks ago. 

Horlick's Malted Milk was produced by the Horlick Food Company (founded by brothers William and James Horlick) in Racine, Wisconsin beginning in 1887.[1]

1904 Horlick's Malted Milk advertisement.

This product was a dried milk powder containing clean, nutritious milk combined with extract of malted barley and wheat that had an indefinite shelf life.



At the time, a problem with infant foods was that milk was required for everything:  fresh milk was difficult to keep, and spoiled quite quickly, rendering it unsafe for infants to consume.




So William Horlick invented his malted milk product, marketing its easy-to-digest nutrients, which became an overnight success.[2]

Though infants were the intended target, Horlick's Malted Milk was quickly adopted by explorers and safety planners, too, as an ideal cold-weather and/or emergency provision due to its light weight, inability to spoil, and rich caloric content.

1905 Horlick's Malted Milk advertisement.

From there, malted milk grew to be an immensely popular soda fountain drink, becoming even more so when the Horlick brothers decided to add chocolate to their product.[2]

The Horlick Food Company was hard-pressed to keep up with supply and demand--they built their 2nd manufacturing plant in 1902, and their 3rd manufacturing plant only 3 years after that in 1905.

In 1906, the Horlick Food Company officially changed its name to Horlick's Malted Milk Company.[3]

In 1921, the death of James led to Horlick's Malted Milk Company splitting:  William took over responsibility for the Americas while James' sons took responsibility for the rest of the world.[1]

Figure 1.  The circular Horlick's crest logo,

Dating this bottle:

Because it has no discernable glass maker's mark embossment anywhere, and the only identifying manufacturing mark is the numeral '3' embossed on the base, I'm going to have to go off the embossed product logo and the physical aspects of the bottle itself in order to get an idea for when it was made.  

The logo embossed on the side of this bottle says HORLICK'S / MALTED MILK / RACINE, WIS. / U.S.A.  It lacks the circular crest (see Figure 1) that appear on later versions.

Earlier Horlick's Malted Milk bottles will have either Racine, Wis. or Slough's Bough, England embossed with the logo, whereas later versions have been found with some combination of Racine, Wis. and/or London, England.








This Horlick's bottle has a ground lip, indicating that it was mouth-blown rather than machine-made and that it was almost certainly made prior to 1915.[4]

The base does not have a pontil mark, which helps further narrow down the time frame to between 1865 and 1915.[4]

The base does, however, have three distinctive air vent bumps equidistant from one another.  And five more that are spaced out evenly around the bottle's shoulder.

The general rule of thumb here is that the more air vent marks you see, the later the bottle was produced, up until the late 1890s (and very rarely into the 1900s).[4]




With this information, I can say with some confidence that this Malted Milk jar was manufactured between the years 1890 and 1900 in Racine, Wisconsin.




References:

[1]William Horlick.  Wikipedia: the Free Encyclopedia, 11 August 2013.  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Horlick>.

[2]"That's Meat and Drink to Me!" Wisconsin's Malted Milk Story.  Wisconsin Historical Society, 2004.  <http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/museum/exhibits/horlicks/>.

[3]Racine, Belle City of the lakes, and Racine County, Wisconsin : a record of settlement, organization, progress and achievement.  Chicago: S. J. Clarke Pub. Co., 1916, 1216 pgs.  <http://www.wisconsingenealogy.net/racine/horlick-malted-milk-company.htm>.

[4]Lindsey, Bill.  Bottle Dating.  Historic Glass Bottle Identification & Information Website.  4 August, 2013.  <http://www.sha.org/bottle/dating.htm>.