The Cork-Lined Screw Cap: A Rigid Cap Whose Lining Takes the Shape of the Thread

"For closing the mouth of a bottle or vessel of the kind above described I employ a cap, made of metal, wood, or other rigid material, lined with cork, india-rubber, or other flexible substance or material of a character suitable for the liquid to be placed in the bottle or vessel. The flexible lining, when a few turns are given to a cap over the neck of a bottle or vessel, yields and accommodates itself to the form thereof, and provides the following (among other) advantages: Perfect and permanent closing of the bottle or vessel, with less breakage than under the present system of forcing corks into bottles, convenience in opening the said bottles or vessels without a corkscrew, a tight fit of the cap to the bottle or vessel along the threads as well as at the edge or rim of the neck, and economy, for the same cap and its elastic lining may be used many times."

**Cap.** Cut the end from a clean tin can a little wider than the bottle's threaded neck, leaving a 15 mm side wall so it forms a cup. File the cut edge smooth, then snip notches round it 5 mm deep and 5 mm apart. **Lining.** Cut a disc of cork sheet for the cup's bottom and a strip for its side wall, long enough to go round and thick enough that the bottle's thread will just start in it. Glue them in with shellac, then fold the notched tabs in over the strip's top edge, as Fox's overfolded edge. **Test.** Discard the bottle's own cap. Screw the lined cap onto the neck with a few firm turns: the cork takes the thread's shape. Fill the bottle with water, cap it, and hold it upside down for a minute. Then fill it with chilled carbonated water, cap it, and see whether it keeps its fizz for a day. Take the cap off and on ten times and test again.

**Howard Busby Fox** of Oxton, Chester, England, received US 55,438, dated 5 June 1866. He described bottles with about two turns of thread for wine or ale, a hexagonal cap lined with solid cork on a thread of increasing pitch, a milled cap with a threaded cork lining, and a lined cap for the screwed filling opening of a metal drum; shellac could bond cap and lining. His claims cover the soft-lined cap for mouths with an outside thread, and the notched edge that folds in over the lining. **Honest limits.** A tin-can end and cork sheet stand in for his made-up caps, and a bought threaded bottle for his. The notebook treats the lining as simply elastic; its modulus, thickness, squeeze and pressures are examples. Your sealed bottle is the result.