Teal Glass is Rare, Teal Sea Glass Even Rarer

I only saved one antique bottle from my father's collection before passing it along to a local collector. After giving me the history of a few in the collection, I asked if he minded me keeping this small, square teal bottle with a stopper in it. He was fine with me holding on to it. I don't think it's of high value in the collector world, but I'd always really liked it. Its diminutive size, the fact that it came with a stopper but mostly because I thought its deep teal color was beautiful. I've got it sitting on my kitchen windowsill along with a similar bottle that's not as old, an apéritif cup and a fluorite crystal, all in that beautiful shade of teal. There's also a little piece of sea glass that's more sky blue than teal but I think it works with the little collection. I washed them all the other day in sudsy water and it got me thinking about teal glass. I've been around antique bottles my whole life and I can only recall a few others from my parents' collection. They were old water bottles. According to Beach Combing Magazine (www.beachcombingmagazine.com), teal glass was originally used for utilitarian glass bottles that primarily held liquid in the mid-1800s. Mineral water, seltzer and ink bottles dominated the color but medicines and even a few perfumes were produced as well. It is one of the rarest types of sea glass you can find with orange being the absolute rarest. (I can't even visualize a familiar bottle made of orange glass. Can you?) The color is achieved by combining cobalt and chromium, along with naturally occurring iron in the sand used for glassmaking. There's a terrific article, "Antique Colored Glass: History, Lore and More" by Lyndon Lasiter at www.rauanitiques.com where I found out the making of colored glass has been around for centuries — since Roman times. For some reason I'd always thought the very first colored glass would have been from much more recent history like the 18th century. First, the piece describes how glass is created. It comes from fusing different types of materials: sand, salt, metallic oxide and powdered flint. Ancient glass makers first achieved colored glass by adding soda ash, salt and white plant (which there's very little known about.) A copper compound would provide the "base" element to receive other elements, creating different colored glasses. Today's colored glass manufacturing uses many of the original ingredients but with a much wider variety of elements to be able to create very nuanced, vibrant shades of color with varying intensities of brilliance. My little antique bottle is embossed on one side with "Preston, New Hampshire" My friend, Google, tells me that this is an antique Preston of New Hampshire glass smelling salts bottle. During the 19th century, smelling salts were used to help people from fainting — primarily women with tight corsets. The main ingredient was ammonia with a perfume such as lavender added. Smelling salts were also commonly used for everything from alertness to melancholy. The company, Preston of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was a 19th century apothecary known for its medicinal preparations. I couldn't find out if the teal colored glass was a signature but the company was apparently quite prominent. They also made tooth powder which might have to be the subject of another article. In the meantime, I'm happy just to look at the beautiful teal glass on my windowsill; it reminds me of my father.