I sometimes see young men who have been facially disfigured in a brawl with someone using a broken bottle or glass. This is a problem significant enough for pint glasses themselves to have been redesigned.
Today’s invention is a simple device to be used in pubs. Before a bottle is de-capped and handed to a customer, the bartender inserts it into a circular aperture and turns it through 360 degrees.
This aperture contains a small diamond glass cutter which scores around the neck of any bottle, 30mm from the cap.
It’s exceptionally difficult to break any bottle cleanly, so the effect that this scoring will have is that the bottle, held by the neck, will snap, when it is struck on a table top to make a weapon, in such a way that the potential attacker is left holding a very short, painfully jagged piece of glass.
Not only is this hard to hold and therefore pretty useless as a weapon, it also makes them look rather ridiculous.
Why not have this as a design feature of beer bottles? That would save time, money, and mean that bartenders don’t have another task to do in a busy and stressful environment.
Would it make the bottles more difficult to transport since they are more likely to smash?
Have you tried this at home? Maybe the industry should know about it if it works.
As regards scoring the bottles in the plant, I’d be concerned about the losses in transit, as you say. It would be feasible to develop a simple barside machine which would accept any bottle, turn it using a motor and then score and decap it.
I have tried this a few times (using an ovenglove for hand protection) and been left holding a suitably short bottle neck most of the time (this is almost always too ragged to hold comfortably since the scoring and breakage correspond with the middle of the grip).
Just to be clear, both the broken neck and the body of the bottle seem to end up very ragged but not with blade-like protrusions. Even if someone chose to use the bottle’s body as a weapon, they would find it hard to inflict anything other than surface injuries.