Harry Eng, the Master of the “Impossible Bottle” | Hacker News Reader

Harry Eng, the Master of the “Impossible Bottle”

puzzlemuseum.com

218 pointsfortran7786 comments

I love impossible objects. I've been obsessed with them since discovering them in the late 90s. Eng is a legend in the field.

My favorite part of this hobby is that no one will tell you how they made their bottles unless you're a fellow bottle maker. The whole point is to encourage people to try their own ideas.

I was inspired to make a number of these myself out of curiosity. I used to email these guys as a teenager and exchange techniques.

Deck of cards in a bottle is really fun and impressive. Total mind f. The ones with the cellophane wrapper still in are just great.

http://bottlemagic.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Cards-in-B...

Rubik's cube in a jar is a great one.

http://images.penguinmagic.com/images/products/original/1258...

And I think my favorite of all, the baseball in the salsa jar. Maybe my favorite art object in the world.

http://bottlemagic.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/MLB-in-Sal...

Also a really fun conversation piece to have on a desk or at home. You have no idea how angry people get when you won't confirm or deny their theories and tell them to try it themselves. No you can't just push the baseball in by force.

Just to give you an idea of how insane these people are in their quest. It is said that Eng invented a tiny vice that could be disassembled, fed piece by piece into a bottle and reassembled inside. A bent coin would be fed through the neck of the bottle and the vice would be used to unbend the coin inside the bottle. The vice is then disassembled and removed.

Cool, no idea how they are done. It's always fun discussing how such objects are made.

I've spent some time making impossible objects as well. A different kind of impossible, where the object changes appearance based on where it's viewed from.

https://github.com/Matsemann/impossible-objects

This blows my mind – well done and thanks for sharing!

Oh that looks really fun as well!

Wow I love these so much.

My first guess was that the centre of the baseball, without the leather, could fit through the mouth. Then the baseball is carefully re-stitched.

If that’s the way it was done, it would need quite a bit of skill and patience!

Most baseball cores are made of wood cork. When socked in hot water, it can be "cooked" until soft. Then it can be squeezed into the bottle. When dried, the cork restores to its original round shape and hardness.

Even if this were attempted successfully, around the baseball is uniformly spun thin yarn. The round shape is created by doing this accurately. And then you tightly sew the horsehide halves together? Are you kidding me?

It's apparently extremely difficult even to stitch up a baseball without the jar.

To be fair though, the baseball doesn't have to perform like a normal baseball afterwards, or even submit to very close inspection. The bottom part would only have to look like it is properly stitched.

Just to add a little color here. In person you can easily inspect all sides of the jar and ball, and there's just enough room in the jar to spin the baseball around. It sorta rattles around in the jar.

Hmmmm you could maybe force the baseball through a metal tube that's just barely small enough to pop out in the bottle without breaking the bottle? Otherwise you'd have to do some weight reduction surgery around the equator of the baseball which gets inflated again using a one-way valve hidden between the seams?

One unwritten rule with these things is that you can't "cheat". For example put an empty box of cards in the bottle and then fill it with sand. If it's a baseball, it's a baseball, not a balloon wrapped in leather.

I'm assuming another unwritten rule is that there must be no trickery with the bottle itself?

I.e. no taking a "wide mouth" bottle, filling it with some stuff, then somehow heating/narrowing the bottle? (Perhaps that isn't physically possible anyway, without leaving visible evidence)

Yes exactly. People's first guess is often (the very boring) "did you just glue the bottom of the bottle on? What?? No!

Did you blow the glass around the baseball? Um, no.

"Everything goes through the neck"

Of course that’s what they do, in most cases. The real trick is to get your mind enrolled in the intricate fiction of how.

I've personally made some of these and I can assure you the salsa jar came from a grocery store shelf. Everything goes through the neck. Gluing the glass back together would be so incredibly boring.

Thing is: it's not fiction.

Is having an apparently solid pieces of wood that can be disassembled like puzzle pieces cheating?

There is trickery. Note the imperfections in the glass. The distortions created by the glass mask imperfections in the contents. For instance, those rubrics cubes look well bent, like they have been stretch and partially disassembled.

I don't think those bottles have been altered in anyway, a lot of standard glass bottles will have imperfections in them that look like that, amplified by the thickness of the bottle itself. You don't see this with jars because they tend to be thinner than bottles.

The rubik's cube inside a bottle is a fairly easy one, if you've ever seen a disassembled rubik's cube then you will clearly see that it's possible to just feed each piece in one at a time and put it back together with some tweezers and a lot of patience.

The distortion in that photo looks like it's just a wide-angle lens, see the cork at the top.

But it's fair game to 'skin' the baseball, insert the baseball core into the jar, and then sew back the leather around the core again?

I'll answer your question with another impossible object.

https://puzzleworld.org/PuzzleWorld/puz/img/arrow_through_co...

"Some people say the coin was placed around a tree when it was very young, and then later carved into the arrow."

Back when I was a kid there was an episode of "The Woodwright's Shop", where he talked about creating a wood box with no seams containing a coin.

The trick was to drill several holes in a tree that you'll eventually cut down, and fill them with coins. Wait five or ten years for the tree to grow wood around them, then cut the tree down and carve out the boxes from the outside, leaving a hole to view the coin.

Note that this is wood. If you know how to compress wood you know how to get wooden things into bottles or through holes in coins. Steam is a wonderful thing.

Your comment reminded me of this "Impossible nail through wooden block" video: https://youtu.be/fEATei2wewY

The comment that mentioned using steam to bend the wood sounds the most plausible, but another technique might be to use a mould with a hole in it and cast the coin with the wood already passing through it. Seems like it would be difficult to get such a nice looking coin that way though.

Wouldn't it be easier to carve the whole thing from a single piece of wood?

The coin is metal!

I love it

I don't actually know how it was done but based on the apparent 'ethos' of makers of impossible bottles, I would guess it's probably a legit baseball and still contains original baseball contents. It seems that these puzzle-makers are creating for the appreciation of their fellow constructors as much as they are for us newbs. I expect the 'good ones' don't rely on easy cheats as much as extreme cleverness, bespoke tools and jigs and painstaking specialized labor.

My guess as to the method is the maker partially unstitched the baseball at the seam and then cut the insides into slices. Then restitched the baseball with enough pieces absent to fit through the bottle's neck and leaving a large enough opening in the seam to insert the remaining pieces once in the bottle. Insert the partially open, partially full baseball then insert the pieces, perhaps with double-sided tape pre-applied so they remain in proper position. Then stitch the open seam closed.

You have never held a baseball, or seen its ~30% deformation when it is hit by a bat that reverses its momentum. It is hard. One fellow just does card decks. Perhaps he has a set of special tools. But a baseball?

My first guess on the baseball is soak it in liquid nitrogen to shrink it a bit, put it in the jar and then let it come up to room temp.

I have a “playing cards in a bottle” one on my desk as a reminder that seemingly impossible things often are quite possible, given enough imagination, patience and perseverance.

The big wooden sign in the jar is jaw dropping. I figure he must have cut it into sticks, fed them in, then glue it together then sand down and finish the outside to hide the lines.

I assume the padlock had to be disassembled and then reassembled inside the jar as well.

The wooden sign is even more astonishing. Assuming that your guess is correct (sliced, inserted, glued), then the engraving on the front would need to take the kerf of the saw cut into account, or else it would show.

Wait, now that I think about it, I bet it was split rather than sawed. The photo on the site is fairly lo-res, but it does look like straight-grained wood that would split straight, and would seamlessly glue back up. And it would reduce the amount of surface work needed afterward. Each piece would key into the next.

> then the engraving on the front would need to take the kerf of the saw cut into account, or else it would show.

Or just engrave the pieces after they're cut while they're clamped together.

I was assuming that the wood was steamed and then compressed. It depends what sort of wood that is.

How would you split it without leaving tooling marks at the top though?

Split it, then remove the tooling marks by slicing off a bit of all the slices, then insert into the bottle.

Like kung fu fighters split boards. Hold it from the edge and give it a whack.

The deck of cards could be inserted by:

1. removing all the cards from the box

2. unfolding the box

3. rolling the box into a tube so it will fit into the bottle

4. unrolling and refolding the box in the bottle

5. roll each card, insert in bottle, unroll

6. put the cards back in the box

Of course, doing all this would be very tedious, and would be easier if one used some specialized tools, but it's doable.

Basically, all of them look like some form of disassembly, insertion, and reassembly inside the bottle. Much like ship-in-a-bottle. Still impressive, though.

Pretty much very similar to the ship in a bottle hobby. But then you look at something like this and are just like, wait did this dude seriously just unsew a pair of loafers and resew them inside the bottle? Wow.

https://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/459/2465/320/bottle05.jp...

That padlock below the neck is killing me.

I notice that the padlocks generally have laminated steel bodies, and are not solid brass. Presumably the procedure is to remove the rivets in the body, separate the laminations and feed each one in separately, then reassemble everything inside?

Insert a disassembled padlock (without the ear of the lock) thru the bottle neck, and reassemble it inside the bottle. Then, carefully hook the ear into the cork, and insert it into the bottle, then carefully attach the ear into one of the holes of the padlock.

Then fully insert the cork, and then use some shaking of the bottle to click the padlock into a locked position.

Or they just used magic.

It reminds me of a quote from Teller:

"Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect."

Cork in two parts - one that you can push all the way through, put the lock on, and then pull out and connect the outer part.

(this also match the twine in the cork)

Remember, it doesn't have to be a padlock, it just has to look like a padlock. The internals of it could be heavily modified to facilitate its assembly inside the bottle.

From an earlier comment:

> One unwritten rule with these things is that you can't "cheat". For example put an empty box of cards in the bottle and then fill it with sand. If it's a baseball, it's a baseball, not a balloon wrapped in leather.

But it doesn't have to functionally be a baseball, or a padlock. If it's a softened, ruined baseball with weak stitching that still counts. I'm pretty sure if you made a padlock with laminations held together by two halves of what would normally be a single riveted pin, that would count: or, you just make a hell of a rivet-seating machine that projects through a bottleneck, and do it for real. But the original functionality of the thing need not be preserved, necessarily. For instance, the metal might be weakened from bending and re-bending, but look normal.

I think there's retained functionality at least in the locking aspect - although, as you say, it might be weakened and not protective:

> "Find a piece of wood from the High Chaparral (Manginita wood). Drill Deck. Put case in bottle. Put cards in case. Put rope through deck. Tie knot. Put nut, bolt, and lock parts into bottle. Hold bolt with a magnet - screw nut on with dental floss. Assemble and lock padlock. Finally sign the pack of cards".

If you look at this one. You'll notice there's not enough vertical room in the bottle to for both the box and a card to slide in from the top. The bottle would need to be twice as tall.

http://bottlemagic.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Cards-in-B...

Once the box is in the bottle, waiting for cards, then they don't need to stack. The card will unfurl as it clears the neck, and enters the box.

I'm sure the 52nd card is harder than the 1st, but there's wiggle room there.

EDIT: Your photo shows a cellophane-wrapped box. I got nothing for that part!

Probably another excruciating step - cellophane goes in, box goes in and is put in the cellophane, then the cards, then the cellophane cover is sealed.

Irrespective of whether this is the case or not, I am blown away!

I'm thinking you have the carton flat inside the cellophane and insert both.

How about this? Carefully take the cellophane off the box without ripping it, or maybe just make a cut in the bottom. Then put the pack of cards in the box as above. Then put the cellophane through the bottle's neck and slide it back over the deck of cards.

The note next to the picture with the wooden sign says, "Our venerable curator has gone nearly blind with a magnifying glass but has failed to find any sign of breaks or glue in this plank."

How reliable is that flavor text? There appears to be a few dark lines running horizontally (could just be more grain though).

It's probably reliable, since it's very easy to fit wooden arrows through small holes in the middle of a metal coin, even when they "apparently do not fit".

That's important because the edge of the board is right next to the glass so any imperfections would be caught instantly.

No particular need to sand down the outside. A veneer can be glued on. The veneer could be rolled up, inserted, unrolled, and then applied.

Possibly softened it through steam, look for "Impossible nail through wooden block" in this thread.

There are many woods that can be steamed compressed, and then re-expanded with boiling water.

I have a tough time believing there are any that can be compressed to a tenth of their original size and then rebound back to full size.

You can check Youtube for videos where people make an impossible nail-in-wood construction, and you'll see just how much you can deform it. It's quite remarkable.

Side note: "eng" means narrow, tight or cramped in German.

...fitting.

And 'fitting' is, of course, the only adjective that could be used here. :-)

I kid you not, I thought that pun was pretty knapp.

See also the classic spirit bottle with a pear inside: https://www.instructables.com/id/Grow-a-Pear-in-a-Bottle/. My neighbors did a couple some times ago, it's actually quite tricky gardening-wise, you need to trim the pear buds, need to shade it partially during shiny days for it not to rot etc.

I've always wanted to try this. Such a cool effect.

Wow! Thanks for putting links up to my website. I r've been making Impossible Bottles for over 20 years. Harry Eng is my inspiration and I'm following in his footsteps. I've even duplicated 7 of his bottles so far. They are fun yet do take time to make.

Thanks for the site! For us upvoting your site it'll only be fair if you share with us how you duplicated those 7 bottles.

I wonder if these bottles can get past a TSA airport security check without breaking them open.

won't most people just outright dismiss the challenge by assuming the bottom was cut off and reattached?

https://www.puzzlemuseum.com/puzzles/amb/eng_botts/images/en...

There must be a general idea how this has been done if not through bottom off and on.

The obvious explanation is we're living in a simulation and the modellers are just having some fun. Very interesting article btw!

Fraud, involving a means of removing and reattaching the bottle base, is much more likely than any of the methods I see suggested here.

Unless you're making a legally binding agreement (or for example, advertising) that the bottle has not been cut, it's not fraud.

If that was the case then there would be a larger variety of objects in the bottles. Even taking into account that the creators want to keep their stories "kind of" believable.

Kind of defeats the purpose and is waaaaay more boring than what's really going on.

I don't believe it. If there were a mastery to this, it would be shared. All that's happening is they are cutting the bottom off and sealing. If I'm wrong show me a method for one of the simpler designs.

I think the simplest design would be the classic, literal, 'ship model built in a bottle'. And with that, it's literally all about manual dexterity in gluing together a model of a boat with all the parts glued on from the end of long tweezers and similar tools. In that case there's nothing 'impossible', it's just an incredibly tedious and painstaking process, and that's the only point of it.

It’s like pulling teeth through the anus. Theoretically possible, but very, very difficult.

The page literally has a step by step guide for one of the simpler designs.

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