Though I often feel in my mind that I am still in my twenties, age is undoubtedly catching up with me and, as I was reminded only recently by my other half, it will not be many years before I celebrate my seventieth birthday. So I can be forgiven for being of a generation that is perhaps more traditionalist in outlook than others.
Take milk for example, an essential commodity we all take for granted. In our house we still have it delivered in glass bottles to our front door by a milkman in his electric milk-float. I mention this because a few days ago, the 11th to be precise, happened to be the day in 1884 that one Dr. Hervey Thatcher, a New York inventor, came up with the first glass milk bottle which was sealed with a waxed-paper top.
Thatcher may have come up with the idea of glass milk bottle in the United States, but it was four years before that, in 1880, that the Express Dairy Company first started using glass milk bottles in this country.
By then most milk was pasteurised under a process invented in 1863 by Louis Pasteur which killed off harmful bacteria. And, in 1894, Anthony Hailwood, a North Country dairyman, pioneered the method of sterilising milk by heating it to high temperatures. Though most milk these days is pasteurised, some folk still prefer to use sterilised milk.
The shape of our milk bottles has hardly changed in my memory and as long as I can recall, they have always been capped by aluminium tops of different colours to represent their fat content.
While it is true that I cannot always recall what I had for lunch yesterday, I can recall the days when milk (and other things like coal and beer) were delivered by horse-drawn carts. When the milkman had his break, the horse had one as well and could usually be seen with a bag of feed hung from its collar as a midmorning snack. If you were lucky, the milkman might let you ride on the cart for a short while, often when the horse was slowly clip-clopping behind him as he rushed backwards and forwards and from house to house.
When horse-drawn milk-floats were replaced by electric ones, they were not quite so interesting. That is, unless you were being paid by the milkman to help on Saturday mornings when he not only had to deliver the milk but collect the week’s money as well, and you were allowed to occasionally drive the float. This, of course, was quite illegal but in those days no-one seemed to bother about a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old schoolboy driving a milk-float around the back streets of north London.
As I say, milk used to be delivered by a milkman and that is the way we still prefer it to arrive. It saves us the bother of carrying it, and milk bottles can be repeatedly cleaned, sterilised and reused and ultimately recycled into glass.
All you can say about the plastic-coated milk cartons that you have to heft from the supermarkets yourself is that they merely add to the ever-growing landfill sites and unnecessary waste I bang on about occasionally.
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Take milk for example, an essential commodity we all take for granted. In our house we still have it delivered in glass bottles to our front door by a milkman in his electric milk-float. I mention this because a few days ago, the 11th to be precise, happened to be the day in 1884 that one Dr. Hervey Thatcher, a New York inventor, came up with the first glass milk bottle which was sealed with a waxed-paper top.
Thatcher may have come up with the idea of glass milk bottle in the United States, but it was four years before that, in 1880, that the Express Dairy Company first started using glass milk bottles in this country.
By then most milk was pasteurised under a process invented in 1863 by Louis Pasteur which killed off harmful bacteria. And, in 1894, Anthony Hailwood, a North Country dairyman, pioneered the method of sterilising milk by heating it to high temperatures. Though most milk these days is pasteurised, some folk still prefer to use sterilised milk.
The shape of our milk bottles has hardly changed in my memory and as long as I can recall, they have always been capped by aluminium tops of different colours to represent their fat content.
While it is true that I cannot always recall what I had for lunch yesterday, I can recall the days when milk (and other things like coal and beer) were delivered by horse-drawn carts. When the milkman had his break, the horse had one as well and could usually be seen with a bag of feed hung from its collar as a midmorning snack. If you were lucky, the milkman might let you ride on the cart for a short while, often when the horse was slowly clip-clopping behind him as he rushed backwards and forwards and from house to house.
When horse-drawn milk-floats were replaced by electric ones, they were not quite so interesting. That is, unless you were being paid by the milkman to help on Saturday mornings when he not only had to deliver the milk but collect the week’s money as well, and you were allowed to occasionally drive the float. This, of course, was quite illegal but in those days no-one seemed to bother about a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old schoolboy driving a milk-float around the back streets of north London.
As I say, milk used to be delivered by a milkman and that is the way we still prefer it to arrive. It saves us the bother of carrying it, and milk bottles can be repeatedly cleaned, sterilised and reused and ultimately recycled into glass.
All you can say about the plastic-coated milk cartons that you have to heft from the supermarkets yourself is that they merely add to the ever-growing landfill sites and unnecessary waste I bang on about occasionally.
.
