Bottle whimseys, also called whimsey bottles or puzzle bottles, are a form of folk art consisting of small handmade sculptures built inside clear glass bottles. First seen in Europe during the 18th century, bottle whimseys (sometimes spelled “whimsies”) spread to the United States and became an especially popular craft following the Civil War, when glass bottle production greatly increased. In the 19th century, the craft of constructing small nonfunctional trinkets called whimseys was elevated by the difficulty of building these little objects inside finished glass bottles. Mostly made from wood, paper, and cloth, these whimseys were carefully reconstructed in the confines of a bottle using metal wires with hooked ends to attach various pieces. Some miniature sculptures like framed photos or chairs were designed to be rolled or compressed and then released once slid inside the bottle’s narrow neck. Bottle whimseys often featured an elaborately carved wooden stopper with an interior locking mechanism making them difficult, if not impossible, to reopen. Artists often used the stoppers as well as the whimseys placed inside a bottle to showcase whittling tricks, like chains, scissors, and fans made from a single piece of wood. The first-known bottle whimseys were religious in nature, expanding on the miniature shrines popular in Germany at the time. Religious bottle whimsies typically featured a central crucifix with various symbolic objects placed around it such as a hammer and nails, a spear, a pole fixed with a sponge, a ladder, a pick axe, a shovel, and more. Other antique bottle whimseys made in the early 18th century include a miniature mine and mechanical mill made by Matthias Buchinger and a scene of a stocking weaver working at his loom by J. C. Held. The European mining scenes produced in oversized glass bottles are some of the most complex, with several levels showing activity ranging from digging for ore, sorting and cleaning, smelting, and finally a town meeting or parade. Once the trend for making bottle whimseys took off in the United States, the subject matter expanded to things like yarn winders, chairs, wishing wells, farm and household tools, tiny houses, interlocking wooden puzzles, shops and bar scenes, fraternal objects, fans, birds, framed pictures, and more. Most folk artists who produced bottle whimseys are unknown as their sculptures are unmarked, however, a few prolific artists like Carl Wörner, Daniel Rose, Adam Selick, and Thomas Edwards have been identified. Wörner in particular developed a unique personal style for building miniature saloon or shop scenes inside bottles, often with a hidden figure somewhere beneath the floorboards. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, communities with plenty of idle time helped spread the craft of building bottle whimseys, with artisans teaching others they met at Hobo camps, prisons, in the military, and at veterans’ homes. The art form reached its pinnacle in the 1910s and '20s, and fell out of fashion once the country began pulling out of the Great Depression. Ships-in-a-bottle also got their start in the 18th century, but from the beginning, these sculptures were typically more faithful scale replicas of actual ships rather than quirky folk representations. The genre of model-ship building exploded into an entire micro-industry of kits and guides in the 20th century.