WHEN, WHERE AND HOW WAS THE CORKSCREW INVENTED?

It's not easy to answer to this question, but at least two things are certain: the corkscrew was invented to extract a cork from a glass container, though not necessarily a bottle of wine, and the first corkscrew registered patent was to the British Reverend Samuel Henshall (1765-1807) on August 24th 1795 with patent #2061. At the beginning of the 18th century a glass bottle was a rare, fragile and costly item and bottles volumes had not yet been standardised. In fact, selling wine in glass bottles was forbidden in Italy until 1728 for this very reason: glass blowers did not produce standard-volume bottles and fraud was a risk. It was on 25th May 1728 that a decree was made allowing the sale of more robust, standard-issue glass bottles from England, known as ‘black glass’ bottles.
Up until then, wine had been sold in casks and barrels, bottles and jugs being used exclusively to bring wine up from the cellars to the table. These bottles were ‘corked’ with pieces of wood wrapped with linen or tow to render them fairly impermeable. A subsequent step was to use corks which stuck out of the bottle neck and were easy to remove, in that wine was kept in bottles just for a short time – usually a question of a few hours to a few days. The English, with their merchant navy and their business sense, were also lovers of good wine, and they imported it mainly from Portugal and Spain, countries that also produced cork. So, glass, wine and cork were brought together, now they had to find a way to remove the cork: but what was the inspiration behind the project? The most likely theory links the invention of the corkscrew to another instrument, in use since the middle of the 17th century, the bullet-screw. Miniature corkscrews, often made in precious materials, were also used to open small bottles and phials of perfumes or medicines.

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