The marble in the bottle

Hold a marble soda up to the light and you can see how it works. In the neck of the bottle sits a glass marble. While the bottle is sealed, the marble is pressed up against a rubber ring just below the mouth. Nothing holds it there except the drink.

Sealed by its own fizz

A fizzy drink is a liquid with gas dissolved in it under pressure, and the gas is always trying to get out. In an ordinary bottle a cap has to be strong enough to resist that push. The Codd-neck bottle turns the push into the seal: the harder the gas presses, the tighter the marble sits.

To open it you do the one thing the gas cannot: you push the marble down. It drops into a chamber in the neck, the gas escapes with a pop, and the marble stays where it fell while you drink.

An engineer in London, 1872

The bottle is named after Hiram Codd, an English engineer who patented it in 1872. Until then fizzy drinks were mostly closed with corks, and corks had a fault: left to dry, they shrank and let the gas out. Codd's bottle needed no cork at all. It was filled upside down, so that the marble fell into place, and the pressure of the drink did the rest.

Bottlers took to it at once. Within a generation Codd's design was being blown and filled across Britain, Europe, Asia and Australasia.

Why it disappeared

In 1892 an American inventor, William Painter, patented the crown cork: the crimped metal cap that still tops beer bottles today. It was cheaper to make, quicker to fit by machine and worked on a plain bottle. The heavy, specially shaped Codd bottle could not compete, and over the next decades it was dropped by one country after another.

A story often told is that the word “codswallop”, British slang for nonsense, comes from Codd's bottle. It is a good story with no evidence behind it.

Where it never left

Two cultures kept the marble. In India the bottle became goli soda, sold from street stalls and opened with a push of the thumb; goli is the word for a marble. In Japan it became ramune, the drink of summer festivals. In both, the bottle stopped being packaging and became the point: the press, the pop, the marble rattling in the neck.

Goli Pop Soda is that Indian bottle, made new. It is still glass, still sealed by a marble, and it is opened the same way.