"Impossible Bottle." How is it made?

Factual Questions
1

There’s a guy in the UK who sells (what he calls) “Impossible Bottles.” The bottle contains a deck of cards, or a padlock and a deck of cards. Here is a video of it. The mystery is how he inserts the objects into the bottle. He claims the bottle is not cut or altered in any way. He also claims the bottle is not formed around the objects.

My first thought is that he heats the bottle and inserts the deck of cards through the (now large) opening. But that would probably char the deck, since is a paper product. Could the opening be made larger by vibrating the bottle at a resonant frequency? Perhaps. But a deck of cards is pretty wide.

2

I was thinking of reporting this as spam, but now I’m curious how it is done (presuming the ad is truthful).

3

Spoilering my guess.

[spoiler] He doesn’t specify that the deck has never been open, only that its perfectly sealed. He opens the pack, extracts the cards and bends/rolls them into the botlle neck. The window in the box allows better folding. Much like a ship in a bottle, he re-assembles the deck inside the bottle.

The lock is open and will fit through the neck and is then locked.[/spoiler]

4

[spoiler]Getting the cards into the box seems doable. Getting the box into the bottle, without leaving any folds or creases, sounds like the hard part.

This would be my guess:

Undo both ends of the cellophane
Slide the box out of the cellophane wrapper
Open both ends of the box
Slide the cards out of the box
Cut a hole in the box (so the cards can be seen once it’s all put back together)
Slide the empty box back into the cellophane
Roll the box and cellophane and insert through the neck of the bottle
Close the bottom flap of the box
Fold and glue the cellophane around the bottom of the box
Insert the cards through the neck of the bottle and into the box
Close the top flap of the box
Fold and glue the cellophane at the top of the box[/spoiler]

5

Don’t know if I need to use spoiler tags, but And the comments on the video page state that there’s a cutout on the side of the box indicating that all the cards are present. I don’t see a cutout on the side of regular Bicycle decks in online pics. So his decks have been opened already.

(Ninja’d)

6

Thought this was going to be about Klein Bottles.

7

A few things that stand out to me :

  1. Although the bottle top has a threaded opening, a cork is used probably because a standard screw cap will not work.

  2. The bottle has a square cross section indicating it was pressed.

  3. The glass seems unusually thick (from the sound) again suggesting pressing.

My guess:

A wide mouthed big bottle was taken. With the bottle on its side, the card deck was inserted into it supported by a thick metal rod such that it did not touch the sides.

A vacuum was then pulled in the bottle so that there is no heat transfer from the sides to the deck of cards.

Next the bottle was pressed using heated elements press.

IMHO, The key here is vacuum. Just like an incandescent light bulb filament could reach 2000+ F while the glass remained at 100s of F.

8

That one’s easy – you just glue two Mobius strips together.
… in four dimensions of course.

9

Hmm, interesting hypothesis. And after watching the video a few times, it does appear the bottle does not have a round cross-section. It looks like there are some flat “sides” of the bottle. But I could be wrong; it’s difficult to tell from the video.

10

The description says that “with high certainty” the bottle was not altered in any way.

11

kleinbottle.com was still up last time I checked. I am not sure of all the details of their technique, but think it involves Pyrex.

12

My sister owns a Klein bottle made by Mitsugi Ohno himself, the famous glass artist. It’s one of only thirty or so he made. He actually delivered it to her house himself, but she was not at home and was devesated when she found she’d missed him. That sucker has to be quite valuble, I have no idea how much she paid for it. I also have a small glass piece Ohno made, a figure of two cranes. It is very lovely, quite elegant, and I hate the thought of trying to move with it.

13

I think those bottles are made from the oil of silicon snakes.

14

AFAIK it’s a legit business. If you pay him the $50 or whatever, he will ship you the glassware packed in a cardboard box.

15

They are made by the guy who wrote this book.

16

Anybody else see an optical distortion in the bottle’s glass about midway up from the bottom? I think I see a physical distortion, too.

I wouldn’t expect to see something like that in a normally manufactured bottle.

17

There’s a fairly wide mouth on that jar so the suggestions above about bending the cards and box to get them into the bottle make sense. None of the pictures look like the box is still plastic wrapped, but magicians reseal card boxes often and there’s probably a way to do that inside the bottle too with enough effort. I’m more impressed by a decent ship in a bottle when the ship required some real workmanship to build.

18

Of course, there’s also the possibility that the guy saying that the bottle wasn’t altered is just lying.

19

Just to be pedantic since this is GQ, those “Klein bottles” that you can buy are of course not really Klein bottles, since a Klein bottle cannot exist in 3-dimensional space, any more than a trefoil knot can exist in 2-dimensional space. They look similar to Klein bottles though.

20

I think that’s a real possibility. These bottles are a bit of a static magic trick, and misdirection—artful lying—is the coin of the realm in magic.

The video clearly shows a molded-in “20 CL” at the base. That’s 200 ml, obviously. The first thing I’d do is immerse the bottle in water up to a likely fill point and measure the displacement.

I’d use that displacement value and a SWAG at wall thickness (plus the known density of likely glasses) to see if we were anywhere near the right volume. While that probably wouldn’t yield a “eureka” moment, it might tell us whether the bottle was previously cylindrical.

I’d also look at all the 20-cl bottles available in Europe to see if any have similar or identical molded bases. That may be a needle/haystack problem, but the bottle’s shape is odd. Besides, sometimes you get lucky.

Someone mentioned distortion about halfway up the bottle. I see it too. I’d look at the bottle through a polarizing filter to check for photoelastic discontinuities—those would strongly suggest pressing. Here’s what I mean:

I also think that rolling individual cards through the wide mouth is plausible. One could minimize distortion in the assembled deck by alternating the rolling direction successively between concave-face and concave-back.

I think the cork is more aesthetically pleasing than a generic metal cap, so maybe that’s why he uses corks. But I bet he’d use white wine bottles if he could. That seems even more marketable and lends a little credence to the rolled-card theory.

None of these ideas is a slam-dunk test, but they could collectively point in the direction of another test. But I bet the bottles are altered as Chronos and others suggest, mostly because:

The fabricator, Clifford Stoll, makes pseudo-Klein bottles too.

Occam’s razor suggests that an artisan skilled in glassblowing and related techniques would tend to apply those skills to a project like this.