During November 1978 I went scuba diving in the Tauranga harbour with a good friend . This was a drift dive starting at the Matapihi rail bridge right down to where the road bridge crosses the harbour today.
We drifted along the bottom with the outgoing tide.
There has been a large storm that must have stirred things up because the harbour bottom had changed since our last dive (we used to repair moorings so were familiar with the area).
I was lucky to find three old bottles during that one dive and one of them had a marble in the neck.
The bottle sat in my library shelf for 36 years until recently.
While having dinner at a Japanese restaurant a few weeks back I was shocked to see them bring out a bottle of lemonade to my granddaughter as it had a marble in the neck! What's more, from memory, it looked mighty like the old bottle I had at home.
Afterwards I quickly went and pulled my old bottle out and compared it with the one we had brought home from the restaurant. They were very similar in more ways than just the marble in the neck.
Research followed.
My old bottle is approximately 128 years old (from 1888-1897) and the Japanese one is currently made by a company KIMURA for a lemonade known as Ramnue (see page 21 in the linked article) and to me it looks like it was made to the original patented design. (see page 8 in the linked article)
Now it turns out that these bottles (called Codd bottles) are not rare and are collected in all their various forms around the world.
I found an article that nicely tells the story.
The bottles.
128 years separate these examples. You can see my old bottle must have been semi hand made.
The story linked above does mention the Japanese version.
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