single late 1850's richly colored emerald green soda bottle manufactured for philadelphia bottler eugene roussel. the slim body has low, bulbous shoulders, a long narrow neck, and is finished with an applied blobtop collar. the bottle features a clean strike, in the form of exceptional large open-lined scripted cursive lettering with the name "e. roussel" running around the entire body. underneath this, the city of manufacture, "philad. a", with raised end-letter "a", sits just above the heel on the front. the base is smooth and evidences manufacture with a 2-piece mold. crudities are typical of age and date of manufacture, including whittling, bubbles, and surface wear. the bottle has been cleaned (i.e. tumbled) and so appears clean and clear. the bottle was fabricated by the dyottville glassworks kensington, pa. eugene roussel came to philadelphia in 1838, and immediately set up a perfumery where he made fancy soaps and toiletries, and additionally had a mineral water fountain. xavier bazin, roussel's lab director throughout the 1840's, bought the perfumery business from him when roussel wanted to focus on his mineral water venture; he continued to use roussel’s name until 1853. between 1840-1844 there was an explosion of bottlers in the region, caused largely by the craze for eugene roussel’s bottled soda and mineral waters; in 1838 or 1839 roussel bottled the first syruped soda water, a lemon flavor. he innovated in the taste and quality of bottled waters using his training in a parisian perfumery and lab to invent recipes that were more palatable, with none of the medicinal or bland qualities soda water of the time commonly had. the craze he created was so great that public demand for bottles triggered the reopening of the closed dyottville factories in 1842. roussel is credited as being the first to flavor his waters with fruit juices, or the first to bottle flavored soda water; neither is technically correct, though he is the first to have made a success of it and thus garners credit as the “father of the american bottled soda water industry".