Bottle Cap Jewelry

Bottle caps were originally designed to be pressed over and around the top of a glass bottle to grab a small flange on the bottleneck. The Crown Cork was patented by William Painter on 2 February 1892 (U.S. Patent 468,258). It originally had 24 teeth and a cork seal with a paper backing to prevent contact between the contents and the metal cap. The current version has 21 teeth. To open these bottles, a bottle opener is generally advised, although some bottles incorporate a screw cap, eliminating the need for the opener.
Individuals have experimented with different ways of opening bottles, including using teeth or snapping them open across another surface. A separate interest to collecting bottle caps is that of interesting ways to open bottles.
The height of the crown cap was reduced and specified in the German standard DIN 6099 in the 1960s. This also defined the "twist-off" crown cap, now widely used in the United States, Canada, and Australia. This bottle cap is pressed around screw threads instead of a flange. Such a bottle cap can be taken off merely by twisting the cap.