The Codd bottle: from 1872 London to goli soda and ramune

Every goli soda, banta and ramune in the world goes back to one idea, patented in London more than 150 years ago: let the drink close its own bottle. Here is how that idea was born, how it went round the world, how it was nearly lost, and where it survives.

Before the marble

Soda water, as something made rather than found in a spring, took shape in eighteenth-century Europe, and one of its first recipes was English. Joseph Priestley, a minister whose house in Leeds stood next to a brewery, worked out how to put the gas he called fixed air into water, and in 1772 he published his directions for doing it. In Manchester the apothecary Thomas Henry was soon making it in quantity: in 1781 he described a way of impregnating water with fixed air in large amounts, for use on board ships and in hospitals.

Making the fizz was one problem. Keeping it in was another. A bottle of soda water was stoppered with a cork, and corks had to be fitted, held down and kept tight against a gas that never stops pushing. That was the problem a Londoner set out to solve.

Three patents and a marble

Hiram Codd (1838 to 1887) took out his first British patent on 24 November 1870. It describes a bottle closed from the inside by a ball, of glass, wood, cork, India rubber or gutta-percha, held against a ring of cork, rubber or gutta-percha set in a groove inside the neck. To open it, the ball was pushed down.

Two more British patents followed. The one of August 1871 made the neck's pinch, its sides pressed in so that the neck turns oval, with a hollow above it for the ball to roll into while the drink is poured. The one of September 1872 added ridges inside the neck to stop the ball rolling back to the mouth when the bottle is tipped. In the United States, Codd was granted patents in July 1872 and April 1873, and in each he signed half his rights over to Richard Barrett of London.

His American patent of 1872 also gives away the trick that puzzles everyone who has held one of these bottles. The bottle was blown in a mould, a glass marble, heated first, was dropped in through the neck, and only then was the mouth formed at the top. The marble is bigger than the mouth because the mouth was made after it.

A Yorkshire glassworks

An idea needs a factory. Codd found his in Barnsley, in Yorkshire, where he went into business with the glassmaking Rylands family at the Hope Glass Works. At first he licensed the right to use his bottle to soda-water makers; as the patents ran out, anyone could make it. The Rylands took out a long string of improvements of their own through the 1880s, and by 1889 were selling "anti-theft" bottles, whose lips were made in a different colour of glass, so that a bottler could pick out his own bottles at a glance. Codd died in February 1887.

Across the British world

Codd's bottle was used most in Britain and across the British Empire, in Canada, Australia and India above all. It never caught on in the same way in the United States. For a generation, in much of the British world, the soda-water bottle and the marble went together.

The crown that ended it

On 2 February 1892 an American, William Painter, patented the crown cap: a crimped metal cap with a cork lining, the ancestor of the cap that tops beer bottles today. It was cheap, simple and quick to fit by machine onto a plain bottle. It took some years to catch on, but by 1914 it had taken over soft drinks and beer. The heavy, specially made Codd bottle could not compete, and one country after another let it go.

India: kancha, goti, goli

India kept it, and gave it its own names: goli soda, goti soda, the kancha bottle, the goli bottle, or simply the soda bottle. Goli, goti and kancha all mean the same thing: a marble.

Goli soda became a cottage industry. The machines were worked by hand, cheap and easy to set up, and many families ran a unit at home. Madras alone had close to 500 soda makers in the 1970s, a veteran maker told the city's heritage magazine, Madras Musings, in 2018; by then there were fewer than 30. The reasons he gave are the story of the whole country: soft drinks in cheap plastic bottles, the cost of the Codd bottle itself, stricter food rules, bottles that were hard to clean, and a supply of bottles that depended on a single maker in Uttar Pradesh.

Early this century a glassworks at Sasni, near Hathras in Uttar Pradesh, which had made Codd bottles since 1981, described itself as the only manufacturer of Codd bottles in India.

Then the bottle went abroad again. On 23 March 2025 the Government of India announced that goli soda was returning to world markets as Goli Pop Soda, supported by APEDA, the country's agricultural export body, with trial shipments to the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and the Gulf.

Japan: from lemon water to ramune

Japan's road was its own. According to Japan's food industry encyclopaedia, a Nagasaki merchant, Fujise Hanbei, is said to have learnt to make a fizzy lemon drink in 1865 and to have sold it as lemon water. The name did not stick; the drink became ramune, a Japanese rendering of the English word lemonade. On 4 May 1872, the same year as Codd's American patent, a Tokyo businessman, Chiba Katsugoro, was given a licence to make and sell it, and that date is kept as Ramune Day. Osaka is said to have had its first maker in 1874.

The marble came later. Ramune in Codd-neck bottles, tama ramune, marble ramune, became popular around 1888, and from 1890 a Tokyo company was making it on a commercial scale, after which it spread across the country. Accounts in English often credit a Scottish pharmacist in Kobe, Alexander Cameron Sim, with introducing the drink in the 1880s; the Japanese record has older names, and both may be true in their own cities.

So the bottle's two great survivors named it in different ways. India named it after the marble. Japan named it after the drink.

How to read an old Codd bottle

Old goli soda and Codd bottles turn up in attics, junk shops and riverbeds, and each one carries clues to where and when it was made.

• The name on the glass. Bottlers had their name, and often their town, moulded into the glass. It is the first thing to look for, and the best way to place a bottle.
• The colour of the glass. Most Codd bottles are pale aqua. Amber, green, purple and blue ones were made too, in far smaller numbers.
• The colour of the lip. A lip in a different colour of glass, blue, amber, green or red, points to the "anti-theft" bottles the Rylands were selling by 1889, made so that bottlers could spot their own.
• The ball. Not every ball is glass. Codd's first patent allowed glass, wood, cork, India rubber or gutta-percha, and bottle historians have found Codd bottles closed by a ball of gutta-percha or something like it.
• The base. Glassworks often moulded their own mark into the base. One Codd bottle studied in the United States was traced, by the mark on its base, to a glassworks in Bombay.
• Whole is rare. Children broke so many bottles to get at the marbles that whole ones are now scarce. New Zealand's national museum keeps one of the rescued marbles, a blue-green "bottley", about 17 mm across.

Two myths, popped

"Codswallop" does not come from Codd. The story goes that beer drinkers mocked his soft drinks as Codd's wallop. But wallop is not recorded as a word for beer until 1930, more than forty years after Codd's death, and the word codswallop itself is not found before 1958; it reached a wide audience on British television in 1959. The Phrase Finder, which traces the history of English phrases, calls the Codd story highly improbable.

"Pop" does not come from the marble either. The poet Robert Southey was already calling a bottled fizzy drink pop in 1812, after the sound of its cork: sixty years before Codd's patent.

The same bottle, still

Hold a goli soda today and you are holding Codd's patent of 1872, almost unchanged: the glass, the marble, the ring in the mouth, the pinch that catches the ball, the press that opens it. Goli Pop Soda, from Surat in Gujarat, comes in that same bottle, and in a glass Codd bottle the marble still goes in before the mouth is made.