Aluminum Water Bottles

Before the plastic bidon came to dominate bottle cages everywhere, there was the aluminum bottle. It was a common water carrier from the 1920s to the 1950s. It needs either a cork stopper or a screw cap to secure the liquid inside. Most often, a rider would carry the bottle in front of the handlebars. “Because aluminum doesn’t have any give to it, the bottle cages were either sprung or had clamps on them to hold the bottles,” says Michael Barry of Mariposa Bicycles. His father, Mike Barry Sr., had collected a few bidons. Some are plain aluminum, while others are anodized. One of them has a top with “Coloral” printed on it in a cursive typeface. It’s the name of a U.K. company that made a bottle popular among the pros in the ’40s and ’50s. It went out of business, but was revived as a small startup roughly five years ago.

The original Coloral faded away in the late ’50s, which was when the plastic bidon was on the rise. The most common plastics were invented in the early 20th century. The demands of the Second World War led to the production and use of those plastics on a large scale. Following the war, plastics of various kinds started appearing in more and more consumer products, including the water bottle.

“The introduction of plastic is pretty interesting. Once you got to the ’60s, companies started making plastic bike parts,” Barry says. One example was the Prestige rear derailleur by the French company Simplex.

“Now, if you think about it, carbon fibre is plastic,” Barry adds. The resins used with carbon-fibre sheets to give them structure are made of polymers, like all plastics. “Now, everything is plastic. The water bottle was just the start of it.”— MP