All About Bottle Openers

The strange history of a simple device

The bottle cap was patented in 1892 by a resident of Baltimore named William Painter. Known as the Crown Cork, it featured a corrugated-flange edge of 24 teeth and was lined with a thin cork disc. Painter was assigned a patent for a “Capped-Bottle Opener” two years later, but it says a great deal about human ingenuity that bottle caps met with greater success at first than bottle openers. The first customers to encounter Crown Cork caps primarily used their teeth, knives, or a table edge to get their drinks open.

Bottle openers as collectibles

Even as modern collectibles, antique bottle openers are rather neglected in comparison to corkscrews or bottle caps. Presumably this is because corkscrews are much older and bottle caps much more colorful and plenteous.

Some of the earliest antique beer bottle openers were small, handheld devices made from pressed metal or cast iron that used a toothed loop to pry off bottle caps. Oddly enough, one of Painter's original bottle opener illustrations featured a metal loop, but not to open bottles. Instead, a metal screwdriver-like tip would wrench open bottles after a finger was inserted through the loop.

In the 1910s and 20s, bottle openers were typically flat and shaped like horses, automobiles, and mermaids or naked women. These antique bottle openers usually featured incised, raised, or stamped letters advertising the name of a particular brewery or beverage company.

Wall-mounted bottle openers

It took three decades of living with bottle caps before America saw the invention of the wall-mounted bottle opener. In 1925, Boston resident Thomas Hamilton filed a patent for a wall-mounted bottle opener known as a "Bottle-cap puller."

Four years later, a man named Raymond Brown added a corkscrew to this design. That bottle openers still hadn’t caught on with the general public is attested to by Brown's patent comments on his device: "The invention is designed for use in hotels and similar places to avoid the constant marring of furniture by the attempts of guests to remove corks and caps from bottles by applying them to the edge of furniture, radiators, etc."

Types of bottle openers

It might have taken nearly forty years, but eventually the American public accepted bottle openers as the couth and convenient way to remove crown caps. Today, most bottle openers are simply beer bottle openers, due to the proliferation of aluminum cans and plastic soda bottles. The latest innovations in bottle opener design thus tend to be bar-related.

Ring bottle openers are a convenient way for bartenders to always have a bottle opener at their fingertips — or at least at their knuckles. Ring bottle openers fit onto your finger just like normal rings, but feature a small hook on their underside. If you need to keep your fingers free, strap on bottle openers use a simple elastic strap to hold a flat metal bottle opener under your palm.

More information on bottle openers