At sea resorts you can often find souvenir merchants offering to buy a real miracle – a ship in a bottle. Bottles can be either very tiny or very solid in size, and inside instead of a ship, sometimes planes, cars, and even whole genre scenes hide. However, regardless of size and content, such a souvenir is a huge delight.
It seems that squeezing an entire 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 from flesh and blood. For them, this is a whole art – to assemble the model inside the bottle so as not to damage either the vessel itself or the smallest details of the assembly. Another important condition is that the item collected inside the bottle should be impossible to pull out.
♥ BY TOPIC: There are 16 circles in this picture, do you see them?
History
The art of collecting structures inside the bottles originated in antiquity, and more precisely, in the 17-18 centuries, in Europe. And to this day some bottles dating from that time have survived. Then in glass vessels placed not only boats, but also religious and everyday scenes. Currently, there are even whole associations of craftsmen specializing in creating miniatures in bottles.
Can I make a “Ship in a Bottle” with my own hands?
So, how is the process of erecting a whole ship, car or other structures in a bottle? It is difficult to give a short answer to this question. There are countless kinds of various techniques and ingenious devices. Each self-respecting master develops his own technique and improves existing ones. Enthusiasts strive to put objects in a bottle that, it would seem, well, can’t get through the neck. To this end, they invent special tools, adapt magnets, rope, etc.
In order for the fruit of a particular plant to appear inside the bottle, it is literally planted inside the vessel, and when it ripens, the roots and substrate are removed. Sometimes blanks for such bottles are blown out already with the object inside. For example, in the USA, bottles are produced with a coin inside, which would never have crawled through the neck.
The easiest way to “squeeze” a sailing ship into the bottle. Because of its structure, such a boat can easily be made folding. The masts are attached to the ship with invisible hinges, allowing them to be folded along the main part. When folded, the structure slides easily into the vessel. It remains only to pull the previously left long threads of rigging, and the boat will straighten inside the vessel.
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