Dali House

The Preussen with five masts, 47 unfurled sails, four lifeboats and 19 deck grates, sealed with a cork and rope around the neck, of unknown origin.

I don’t know why. One morning I woke up thinking about ships in bottles and was surprised to discover that I’d suddenly become interested in how it’s done. Probably this is a lump of wisdom that’s common as muck to most people, but I had no idea. So I gassed up the search engine.

YahooAnswers.com “best answer”: “They build the boat first, then they have Chihuly blow a bottle around it.”

Well, I know Dale Chihuly’s confusingly revered yet satisfying breakable work, so at least I started out with a laugh.

On his website Impossibottle!, Merlin refused to reveal the secrets, something like a magician. “The whole raison d’etre of impossible bottles is to make you think. It would be against the spirit of the thing for me to post methods for making the bottles, not to mention the fact that it would anger some of the commercial ‘bottle-makers’.”

That’s even funnier.

The real technique(s) soon emerged, and for anyone else that didn’t know, it goes like this:

Armed with long-handled tools, they build the ship first, with foldable sections, using hinges, and then slide it into the bottle and pop the folded bits, like the masts, back out. But other ships, “especially broader-beamed ships like motor boats”, the ship is indeed assembled in the bottle.

Something else I didn’t know: ships in bottles are part of a larger genre called “impossible bottles”, which Wikipedia for some reason describes as “a type of mechanical puzzle”. These are bottles containing any object that doesn’t appear to fit through the neck. Could be a boat; could be “matchboxes, decks of cards, tennis balls, racketballs, Rubik’s cubes, padlocks, knots and scissors”.

Wiki says these objects are all disassembled and then reassembled inside the bottle. “Only dice and pennies and an occasional metal figurine have bottles blown around them”, but this is apparently expensive and ruins your chance of (honestly) saying, “No, I actually got that thing in there through the neck.”

There are tricks. At FolkArtInBottles.com, Greg Alvey suggests using a folding piece of cardboard as a gauge for accurately measuring the inside of the bottle or measuring the bottle’s exterior and subtracting the thickness of the glass.

Alvey also recommends building “a working platform built to these exact dimensions” on which the components can be assembled to make sure they fit, keeping in mind that the length of the bottleneck can cause insertion problems.

Who first came up with this pastime? Bastiaan “Bob” de Jongste says on the same website that the craft’s origin is unknown, but the first “ship in a bottle” (which they actually call SIBs) was made in 1784 in Italy by a professional model builder, a three-masted warship, probably Turkish or Portuguese.

SIB popularity soared after fast clippers hit the surf after 1840.

Frans Dekker’s more recent recreation of the Preussen.