Origins: The Boston Round Bottle (Part 2) ; What's in a name?

Origins: The Boston Round Bottle (Part 2) ; What's in a name?
Container and Packaging
by Container and Packaging
September 8, 2020, Updated August 10, 2021

The secret society of the Boston Round (which we have learned is called the Order of the Boston Round, hereafter referred to as the OBR) has struck again. It’s clear that they worked their way into the senior management team here at CPS, as our request for travel tickets to Boston were refused.

This has been a setback for us, but nevertheless, we will still bring out the truth of the Boston round origins. We’ve lost a good lead but we decide to work our research from another angle. Instead of looking back through history, we'll look from the past to the present.

We discovered that people have made bottles for thousands of years. In prehistoric times they were often made from clay or woven plant material and coated with asphaltum (a sticky oil with a tar-like consistency.) This would make them ideal for storing water, food, or medicines.

However a key feature for the Boston round bottle is that they are made of glass or plastic. the earliest known glass bottles were made by the Phoenician civilization that lived in the area now known as Lebanon. Since Boston Round Bottles are typically made of glass or plastic, ancient Phoenicia seemed a good place to get started in our search. This meant that the earliest ancestor of a Boston Round could have been made around 1200-539 BC.

Could our new found nemesis (the OBR) really be this ancient? Could they have existed for 3,000 years with so few knowing about their existence? Find out in the next installment of Origins: the Boston Round Bottle.