Taking groceries into the house I retrieved the bag with the 750ml bottle of Bulleit in it, it was about waist height when the bag spilt and the bottle falls out SMACK against the concrete driveway.
Amazingly the bottle was intact, a few scratches at impact but solid, no cracks or crazing.
I expected it to smash to pieces. Tough glass they use I guess to stand up to rigors of shipping and all.
I did drop a jar of smuckers peanut butter once. And that broke, sadly it was an unopened jar of natural chunky pb.
No surprise that whiskey bottles are weaponized by drunken brawlers.
Had the opposite experience. One of those little green bottles of ginger ale that had been riding in the car for a couple of days, fell from shoulder height, bounced once and exploded when it hit the second time.
Surprise to me. I thought the plastic cap would blow before the glass ruptured.
Glass can be funny about how it breaks. The most extreme case is Prince Rupert’s Drops, which are almost indestructible when struck almost anywhere, but which instantly disintegrate from the slightest bit of trauma to the “tail”. But almost all glass objects have similar properties, to a lesser degree: Unless you take extreme care to prevent it, they’ll have internal stresses, and depending on how those stresses are arranged, there will be some spots where they’re much more fragile than others. Hit the fragile spot, and it’ll break, hit anywhere else, and it won’t. And there’s no obvious way to tell, by the naked eye, where those fragile spots will be (though you can sometimes spot them with a polarizer, for clear glass).
Last week I dropped a stemless wine glass. It was empty, and it fell from waist height down to a tile floor. I was surprised to hear the sound of the glass bouncing from the first impact, but it didn’t survive the second impact. My take on all things glass or ceramic is that eventually it will break, whether it’s today or a thousand years from now, so all I do is laugh when it happens.
When I was first married, my wife had a cheese box subscription from France. About 6 or 8 different types of cheese delivered about every month or so. It was ungodly expensive, but she was paying for it and hey, French cheese. I didn’t complain. Of course, cheese being cheese, some of the items were a bit more pungent than others. One was particularly smelly, and for some reason she thought that our Dalmatian might have an opinion about this cheese (about a 5 ounce wedge). She stuck it in front of his nose so he could smell it.
She almost lost her hand.
My first question was “What did you think would happen?”.
Two or three summers ago, I bought a jar of Clausen pickles (refrigerated) at the grocery store. Because the humidity was high, naturally water condensed on the jar. At checkout, I was taking it out of the cart, and it slipped from my hand between my cart and the checkout counter and fell to the floor. I was quite surprised that it did not break, and apparently so were the bystanders.
I once worked in one of Ontario’s Brewers Warehouses. I worked on the “empty side,” where empty glass beer bottles were sorted for delivery back to their respective brewer, for sanitation and refilling. Occasionally, a bottle (usually a longneck of some sort) would escape the sorter’s hands, hit the concrete floor, bounce across it a couple of times, and then break. Nine times out of ten, the bottle broke where the neck met the shoulder of the bottle. I don’t know about the relative strengths of beer bottle necks and beer bottle bodies, but we usually found ourselves picking up a neck and a body, and sweeping up the few shards and splinters into the trash.
On that shopping trip I took care to pull in the driveway because it’s on an angle. And if I backed in I know the bags sometimes shift their contents and may spill out when I pop the hatch.Which I didn’t want to happen to that bottle.
( It happened with a watermelon this summer. Pop the hatch and out it rolls splat. My husband picked up the two halves and right away went to toss it on the garbage! WTF are you doing ! NO! I can rinse it off and wrap it up ffs! )
Imagine my surprise when a Pyrex baking dish exploded on contact with a wood floor, didn’t even bounce once. That’s when I learned about internal stresses in glass.
I sometimes wonder how I would keep the cats out of the way if I dropped one of their pottery food bowls. They’d be swarming like sharks to eat amongst shards of pottery.
[A heavy drinker] staggers into the street with a bottle of whiskey in his coat, and he’s hit by a car. Feeling wetness on his body, he pleads, ‘Dear Lord! Please let it be blood!’
Grab cats, put cats in different room and close the door. Clean up glass. For some reason, hubs still hasn’t learned this lesson and ends up cutting himself in his hurry to clean up before the cats get cut.
Hubs has thin sided but thick bottomed beer glasses. One got knocked off the counter, flipped in midair and landed intact on its base. Another one got knocked over on the counter and broke.
I wonder if resonance patterns are involved in any way? My observation, over many, many years of being a fumble-fingered klutz is that open-ended items like glassware tends to break on the second bounce. Closed items like jars and bottles either clunk or disintegrate. I still remember the time the bag had tipped and the 750 of pretty decent vodka shattered all over the driveway.
My siblings and I put together a book of memories for our parents on their 50th Anniversary. One of my sisters wrote about being a little girl, bringing home some milk in glass bottles and deliberately clinking them together because she liked the sound. Until…
Real (quasi-antique) Pyrex, or the modern borosillicate stuff? Because the newer stuff is much, Much more brittle than the old stuff. Not that the old stuff won’t break as well if it falls poorly.
The old stuff is the next closest thing to the Prince Rupert’s Drops: Almost indestructible, except when hit in just the right way that smithereens it. There’s no such thing as damaged classic Pyrex.