Monday, October 5, 2009

What happened to the Bromo Seltzer Bottle?




Almost nothing today matches the impact of the colorful Bromo Seltzer image. It was a brand extraordinaire and a design triumph. This 1995 Baltimore Sun article we found fills in the colorful details.

The 51-foot-high bottle was fabricated of laminated steel. It was 20 feet in diameter, tinted blue to resemble the headache remedy's bottle and mounted on the very pinnacle of Baltimore's Emerson Drug Company headquarters at Lombard and Eutaw streets. What became known as the Bromo Seltzer Tower served as a potent landmark. The bottle even had a huge crown on the top.

So what happened to it? The revolving, blazing bottle lasted 25 years until January 1936, when winds and rain got the best of it. Adolph F. Nethen, general foreman of Claude Neon Lights of Maryland, climbed to the top and took the metal sheeting apart. The rusted, decayed materials were taken to the scrap yard. A sad demise for a great symbol.

We want that bottle back!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I am looking for old Bromo selter
display items, dispensers, and ephemra

Unknown said...

The Bromo Seltzer Tower is open to the public every Saturday 11am-4pm. Featuring 15 floors of artists and offfering history clock room tours of the historic towe, Sounds of the Tower (free musice on the 2nd and last Saturdays and the extensive collection of Ernie Dimlers Bromo Seltzer bottles and Emerson ephemera