At the seaside resorts you can often find souvenir merchants offering to buy a real miracle - a ship in a bottle. Bottles can be both very tiny and very solid, and inside, instead of a ship, sometimes planes, cars and even entire genre scenes are hidden. However, regardless of the size and content, such a souvenir is a huge delight.
It seems that squeezing a whole ship (even in miniature) through a narrow neck requires the intervention of supernatural forces. But no, ships in bottles are collected not by magic elves, but by people of flesh and blood. For them, it is a whole art - to assemble a model inside a bottle so as not to damage either the vessel itself or the smallest details of the assembled structure. Another important condition is that the object collected inside the bottle must be impossible to pull out.
History
The art of collecting structures inside bottles originated in antiquity, or rather, in the 17-18 centuries, in Europe. To this day, some bottles have survived, dating back to that time. Then, not only boats were placed in glass vessels, but also religious and everyday scenes. Nowadays, there are even whole associations of craftsmen specializing in the creation of miniatures in bottles.
Is it possible to make a "Ship in a bottle" with your own hands?
So, how does the process of building a whole ship, car or other structures in a bottle take place? It is difficult to give a short answer to this question. There are countless different techniques and ingenious devices. Each self-respecting master develops his own technique and improves the existing ones. Enthusiasts tend to place objects in the bottle that, it would seem, well cannot pass through the neck in any way. To this end, they invent special tools, adapt magnets, ropes, etc.
In order for the fruit of this or that plant to be inside the bottle, it is literally planted inside the vessel, and when it ripens, the roots and substrate are removed. Sometimes the blanks for such bottles are blown out with the object inside. For example, in the USA, bottles are produced with a coin inside, which would never fit through the neck.
The easiest way is to "squeeze" a sailing ship into the bottle. Due to its structure, such a boat can be easily made foldable. The masts are attached to the ship with inconspicuous hinges that fold down along the main body. When folded, the structure easily slides into the vessel. It remains only to pull on the previously left long threads of the rigging, and the boat will straighten inside the vessel.
Buy "Ship in a bottle"
See also:
- 7 famous symbols you might not know about
- Why bumps on the "A" and "O" keys of the keyboard.
- How to make a brazier, an aquarium, a bench, a lamp, a letter box, etc. from old Macs. (a photo).
