The base of an amber bottle, embossed PAT<sup>D</sup> AUG 24 1886 with mould number 19 in the centre. That patent date is recorded on bottles of Duffy’s Pure Malt Whiskey of Rochester, New York, a whiskey sold as medicine.
The base of a bottle in thick amber glass, broken away from the body. It was picked up at an old mining and milling site in the Jasper area. The site is on private land and was visited with the owner’s written permission. Nothing else was taken.
Around the raised circular panel on the underside it reads PATD AUG 24 1886, with the mould number 19 in the centre. The day of the month took some work to read, and how it was read is set out below, because the whole value of this object is in that date.
The legend runs round the ring, so from any one angle a third of it is upside down. Photographed flat and then read a quadrant at a time, it gives PAT with a raised D at the upper left, AUG across the top, two digits at the upper right, and 1886 along the bottom.
The first of the two digits is plainly a 2. The second is an open topped 4, although at a glance it could be taken for a 1. One check settles it. A patent date embossed on a bottle is the date the patent issued, and United States patents in this period issued on Tuesdays. In August 1886 the Tuesdays fell on the 3rd, 10th, 17th, 24th and 31st. The 21st was a Saturday, so AUG 21 is not a date any patent carried. AUG 24 is, and it is what the glass shows.
A base embossed Pat’d Aug 24 1886, in amber glass, with a mould number in the centre, is recorded on bottles of Duffy’s Pure Malt Whiskey, made by the Duffy Malt Whiskey Company of Rochester, New York. Mould numbers 4, 5, 6 and 17 turn up in dealer and auction descriptions of the same base, and 19 belongs to that series. A complete bottle carries the company’s name and Rochester, N.Y. U.S.A. on the body. This fragment is the base alone, so the maker’s name is not on it, and the attribution rests on the patent date, the colour and the mould number taken together.
Duffy’s was sold as a medicine rather than as a drink, and that was the whole commercial point of it. Walter B. Duffy had inherited a cider refining business in Rochester from his father Edward, and by 1881 the city directory lists him as a distiller and rectifier at 27 and 29 Lake Avenue. In 1886, the same year as the patent on this bottle, the company began advertising the Celebrated Duffy’s Malt Whiskey as the greatest known heart tonic. It went out through druggists as well as bars. In place of shot glasses the company gave away graduated dosing spoons, marked on the bowl Duffy’s Pure Malt Whiskey, a Medicine, with teaspoon, dessert spoon and tablespoon lines on them. Duffy persuaded temperance groups that the product was medicine.
Samuel Hopkins Adams took it apart in The Great American Fraud, eleven articles written for Collier’s Weekly in 1905, part of the campaign that produced the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. The product outlasted the exposure comfortably. It was still being sold through pharmacies and grocery stores during Prohibition as a nutritional supplement, and it went off the market after 1926.
An embossed patent date is a floor, not a date of manufacture. The bottle cannot have been made before 24 August 1886. It could have been made a good deal later, because moulds stayed in service for years and went on stamping the same patent date for as long as they were used, and Duffy’s itself ran into the 1920s. When the bottle was emptied and thrown away is a further question again.
So this fragment establishes one thing about the site, and it is worth stating exactly: somebody was there on or after 24 August 1886. It does not date the buildings, the workings or the crusher, none of which it was found inside. It is still the firmest date anything at the site has given up, because it is a date read off the object rather than inferred from its shape.
What is not known. The patent number, and what it actually covered. Collectors describe Duffy’s as a patented bottle and the date is on thousands of them, but the search behind this record did not turn up the patent itself. A number from the issue of 24 August 1886, to Walter B. Duffy or to the glasshouse that made the bottles, would settle it. The fragment has not yet been measured. If you know the patent, or you have a Duffy’s base with mould number 19, the curator would like to hear.
Sources: Jack E. Fincham, Did a Medicine Bottle Change History? Duffy’s Malt Whiskey, Bottles and Extras, May to June 2013, pages 50 and 51. Peachridge Glass, Is it just a Duffy’s Pure Malt Whiskey bottle?, May 2013. Dealer and auction descriptions of Duffy Malt Whiskey Company bottles recording the same base embossing and mould numbers 4, 5, 6 and 17.