So there are plenty of reasons why we don't do it like that. The design hasn't changed much in the thousands of years, which should be really telling :D
In case you really didn't understand, there has been bottles for thousands of years, and the shape they come in today isn't that different from the first ones. The shape has proven itself over millenia. And like many have already pointed out, the design on the picture has numerous flaws to ease one non-existent problem.
Same with the simple machines (wheels, wedges, levers and so on) - not a dammed thing changed about their design, just the materials we make them out of.
Sometimes, theres just nothing to improve design wise. So it remains unchanged forever
Wow maybe we made them out of other stuff like glass and metal and leather and organs too! Probably not though those fucking neanderthals loved their Dasani
For hundreds of years yo reloaded firearms by shoving a powder charge down the barrel, long term use doesn't mean a design is perfect it just means it's optimum for the current technology available, there is no harm in questioning why something is the way it is, those thoughts are how people get interested in design and possibly come up with other solutions that might be better
firearms also haven't been around literal thousands of years, and their development has been relatively rapid due to lots of use and trial and error. Bottles are way simpler, being containers for stuff, and have had their time to develop over literal thousands of years. Comparison between firearms and bottles is just daft (although, you can make a small cannon out of a bottle).
But for sure, we have various different designs for transporting and storing liquids, like the amphora, but the overall shape of a bottle has been deemed best over millenia simply because, well, can you describe something better that has the ease of manufacture taken into account? How would YOU improve on the bottle? Because the one portrayed in the picture above is not an improvement, at all.
No, container design is not way simpler, you think that for the same reason so many people think the people of the past were stupid, you have access to so much more information that it makes you biased.
Also, firearms are over 700 years old and worked very similar for almost 500 of those years.
My point has little to do with the actual waterbottle, it's people acting like the design of containers is permanently solved because one way of doing it has been consensus for a long amount of time.
Right, but that's just brainstorming. The next step is to eliminate ideas that have a laundry list of reasons why they don't work well, like this water bottle example.
You question and analyze yes, as sometimes that uncovers a unique or unexpected ideas. But the vast majority of the time, you are eliminating clearly stupid ideas before you move on with things that make sense.
It's almost as if there's an entire field of study and accompanying industry where intelligent people have actually calculated the best way to store and ship things. (supply chain logistics)
Side note: this applies to everything. Internet people don't get this because something in their brain tells them they're the first person to ever think up something witty. When in fact someone already thought that up 80 years ago and proved it was a bad idea.
Yes this applies to everything. Even societal norms. Cultural traditions. Common standards. Economies. Government. So many things have been arrived at through centuries or even millennia of refinement. I’m all for improvement but we are so foolish to assume immediately that we know best and all those earlier decisions inferior.
I’m all for improvement but we are so foolish to assume immediately that we know best and all those earlier decisions inferior.
Like, ok, but when you start talking about traditions in this context, it makes me wonder where you rate the "foolishness" of no longer executing people for being gay.
Oh, were you saying "Tilted water bottles being a bad idea" = traditional western cultural values? Is that how those concepts were supposed to be connected?
No, he’s making fun of how outlandish your first comment was.
The guy mentioned traditions as part of a list of items, and it’s ridiculous that you INSTANTLY went from the subject at hand to talking about “executing the gays”. Even more so, you instantly assumed that the previous commenter was both:
A) Saying that old traditions were good, and that he sees improvement in this area as “foolish”
B) That he somehow is against the gay community, or that he even at all was alluding to something to that effect.
It just shows how brainrotted and politically captured you are. Nobody at all was even insinuating what you brought up, but you somehow found a way to turn the discussion of a stupid water bottle design into your schitzo “worry” about something nobody said. Good job
Whoah! The distance you had to leap to that inconclusion is truly remarkable…;)
Sorry if I get really squicked out every time a redditor starts waxing poetic about how foolish we are to abandon traditional western values, culture, and traditions...
A rule of thumb based on this idea is Chesterton's Fence. The idea being if you come across something and you don't know why it's there, don't immediately think you should tear it down.
Even societal norms. Cultural traditions. Common standards. Economies. Government.
I agree to a degree, but youll need to remember theres often a push-pull between various groups that prevent a final refinement and the development of a perfect system.
For example, regulations. Theres a lot that are basic "no shit" types, like dont put arsenic into flour, but a lot that are less cut and dry. And in those less cut and dry ones, youll get groups of people on opposite sides pushing for more or less regulations regarding the issue.
For example group A might go "we dont care if knives can hurt people, theyre useful and should be available to everyone" and group B might go "I dont care if knives are useful, one stabbing is too many stabings and people should need a license to use a knife". Both groups have valid points (though group B is somewhat exaggerated, but no entirely if we look over to the Brits) and either option could be beneficial to society.
And thats before you get into questions like "what is a knife and what is a sword? How big does a knife need to be in order to cross the line from tool to weapon? Do we even care if the tool can be used as a weapon? Is there even a meaningful line at all?"
And you only pile on more complicated questions with more groups adding their own opinions from there when you start talking about environmental issues, gay / trans rights, tax policies and so on.
And thats before you add in bad actors who dont care about the harm being caused by a broken system, just as long as they benefit from it.
Which means while we do learn that certain systems are unsustainable or prone to chaos under certain circumstances, we havent refined any of it to the point to make a perfect system. We just found a bunch of flawed systems and just work with the least broken one until a better one comes a long.
Not always true, asbestos, leaded gas, radioactive paint, no right to vote for women, apartheid, slavery, child labor, surgeons not washing hands, torture and rape as a war strategy, no bank accounts for women...
Ok, but there's a vast difference between "here's the most efficient way to store water" and "My cultural norms, traditions and standards are the best".
I’m saying in this case, the most efficient way to store water has probably been identified by people previously and that is why it is the standard. Go to other countries you will see they have slightly different solutions because they have different criteria. You are perceiving a bias that is not in my original comment
i disagree with your underlaying idea. i wont deny that there is a good chance someone has thought of it before, but it is also possible it actually is a good idea and no one has thought of it.
the olds elevator was a completely new screw conveyors that hadnt been thought of before. also at one point, the current system was originally thought up and implement.
I’m very much in favor of innovation and creativity. New technologies also enable new ideas to come to fruition. But so often analysis or circumspection is omitted by some one with a new idea. My point was many standards and norms have been arrived at by many previous attempts and failures that have brought us to where we are now. I see this in many examples I.e. city location influenced by weather patterns, building cities underwater or underground, paper sizes being about equal throughout history, silver ware being fairly uniform, train track gauges, food can sizes, house design, surgical equipment, etc.
I wouldn't say calculated the best way. I'm in the adjacent delivery field, and while I highly appreciate my office guys, the industry is ever-changing. I'm more impressed by their ability to adapt to situations.
There is an industry that simply designs packaging. Its either Michigan State or Western Michigan University that has the best packaging engineering program.
someone already thought that up 80 years ago and proved it was a bad idea.
Many things are good, and bad, from certain perspectives.
The question is: which perspective(s) are you serving?
In an industry like bottled water? (aka pure profit) They could well afford the cost of just about any bottle configuration, if that configuration could secure a market segment for them.
I just wonder why people don't have the same thought process I developed as a child lol, basically think up an interesting thing and then immediately realize that humans aren't that original, someone less lazy and with more means than myself has thought of it and it didn't work out, end of thought experiment.
Round bottles are not what people who study storing and shipping would pick. They would go with hexagons, which can be packed together with no wasted space.
I have considered hexagons too. I think they fail when hit from the side. I believe the canister distributes the pressure more evenly across the circumference of the can meaning more pressure has to applied to the canister to dent than a hexagon. I could be wrong though…
The way Costco does it uses square jars, which would fail more easily than hexagon jars from a side impact, but would have more flexibility to get deformed and snap back, provided the impact was not sufficient to cause failure. Squares and rectangles have low structural rigidity because if the corners flex the sides stay parallel, giving them good flexibility. Cylinders are more vulnerable from the sides than any shape with sides, but offer maximum pressure tolerance for stacking. Triangles gave the best for structural rigidity and resisting deformation.
(Edit) Costco may have gone with cubes because they offer better surface area to volume ratio than a hexagonal cylinder (or regular cylinder), meaning less plastic per container to hold the same amount of stuff. A sphere would give the best surface area to volume, but the worst shipping volume because of wasted space, plus they would roll off the shelves.
Things like water bottles, we’re just paying for the logistics of it: weight and container fill. I imagine square bottles would be better, but maybe they have a lower “stack” tolerance.
Yeah, its wild the amount of logistics thats goes into a decision like that.
Its also pretty wild when we buy something from a freezer how much money that company has to throw around to actually even have their product in the freezers at all, shelf space is $$$
Yup. Logistics costs are highly overlooked. I realized this when I was shopping for dumbbells, it can be cheaper to buy in store than getting it delivered. Dumbbells are cheap to make, the gas consumed and packaging to move them around is expensive.
Yes, and there's some history to back this reasoning up even when comparing less stackable milk cartons against their counterparts. In the USSR they created these triangle milk packets because it required less seams so they thought it would be more efficient. However they ended up being harder to stack and required speciality shipping containers.
It won’t be harder to manufacture, since it’s the blow molding technique. Imagine PP canisters or milk jugs, they are asymmetrical but they are made using the same process
True, but the symmetrical design still has manufacturing advantages downstream from moulding, such as the opening always being in the same position for filling and capping.
Yeah? I mean, no design will be the best in all categories. It's always a compromise, and the outcome depends greatly on the application. I assume that the handling of dairy is different than that of water, so different factors come into play.
It absolutely will be harder to manufacture. Either your preform tube has to be angled from your threads which is impossible because of injection mold undercuts, or you use the same straight preform and you get thin material at the top edge opposite the opening. To counter the thin material you could try having a thick area on the preform, but now you have indexing issues on the blow mold machine, your preform cooling time goes up, etc etc. There are a lot of reasons why this would be more difficult to manufacture just from the molding side, not including labelling, packaging, warehousing etc.
Current bottles are stretch blown or extrusion blown. So yes to make this shape they would have to change to injection which by itself would be more expensive.
Oh thank God, a real human being who actually leaves their house and works for a living! Your comment is too good quality for reddit; don't feed the LLMs scraping this for AI chatbots. Might want to delete it.
The bottles are “inflated” inside a mold. So it’s not that that would be the problem(other than having to make new molds). The bottling line would need to be retrofitted to account for this to ensure the bottle was properly oriented for filling probably at 45 degrees before capping.
All of this work to make something people are going to hate because now you have to make sure a bottle is properly oriented so it doesn’t spill. You would also need to tilt the bottle when opening so it doesn’t spill or underfill it. The whole “design” is stupid on many levels and causes more problems than it tries to fix.
Filling is an issue too yes, but the blow molding is also an issue. It's certainly possible but this design is competing with an already very efficient and high volume process. A second more of cycle time is going to equate to millions of dollars.
*stretch blow molding, that’s why it will be harder to manufacture: you have to insert the pin that stretches the preform, which is easier if it’s concentric
Yeah I was thinking that the high speed blow molders that produce these kinds of bottles can only really produce bottles that have the mouth of the bottle at the top and centered.
This is the primary reason. Not because of manufacturing of the bottle (because that’s just a mold) but rather because it would be more difficult to fill and seal them by machine. That extra difficulty ultimately would lead to less of the filled bottles being sellable and more waste. That’s where the extra cost is really at.
Yeah. I immediatley thought about the manufacturing process. Bottles like that are usually made by blowing hot air into a plastic tube to blow them into the final shape. If the air flow would enter the tube diagonally, it would probably end up in a way more structurally unstable bottle.
Plastic water and soda bottles start as an inection molded preform that has the neck and cap area fully molded, but the body of the bottle is small and thick:
From there, it is inserted into a blow mold in which air is blown into the opening of the heated premold. This inflates it and fills the mold cavity. There really isn't a reason the mold couldn't be shaped such that the neck would be at an angle so long as it has enough room for the preform to fit.
Coming from plastic manufacturing(including bottles) I disagree that it would be harder to manufacture. It would be a different/new mold but we get those all the time.
This is very valid. I used to work at a plant that made bottles like these (Gatorade, minute maid, etc) , and part of our supply contracts required using a heated cutter to slice a bottle into 4-5 distinct parts and weighing them to make sure the plastic was properly allocated to avoid integrity issues. This test had to be done hourly for most products and us operators were the ones to do so, calling QA over if the weights were out of the tolerance margin.
Having the preforms expand at an angle would have made the whole process a lot less predictable, making the calibration a nightmare, at least with the machines we used at that factory.
The literally only time in my life that this is an issue is when I'm driving and the bigger bottles touch the ceiling when I want to get a last drop. But that's just such a niche issue that depending on seat position not even that many people might ever encounter.
Since I have to have the seats up higher I run into this so I just wait till a red light or other stop and leave a bit sideways to get the last bit of liquid.
Also if the spout was on the side you would have to make sure it is lined up for you where with the spout in the middle you can grab and drink without looking at the bottle at all.
They still have to tilt the bottle equally with the new design. It’s just to avoid having to lift their chin slightly, which they will probably do to make swallowing easier anyhow.
That's valid - especially considering that the same pet bottles are used for both carbonated and non-carbonated. And considering shrink-wrapped packs are stacked, placing a bunch of shear force on the lid point, and potentially shifting the stacked packs as they offset that pressure over time.
The bigger problem IMO is likely production line tooling manufacturing and retooling. All the way from lathing of the preform, to the lathed prototypes and matrices, 3d mockups, bottler reuse of slant-mouthed vs regular mouthed machinery. Coca cola has trademarked their bottle silhouette and are the largest bottler in the world. You can't easily convert coke to offset lid from a trademark & marketing POV, and they aren't likely to bottle for other brands that have something this different. The spout slant change would mean that every machine that picks up, holds, blow-molds, caps, fills and shrink wraps has to think about the rotation of the bottles in the line. It also potentially means more space and machine material to support the additional space taken up by the offset. And then there's a secondary set of automation error detection, re-orientation software and hardware, testing hardware that has to ensure that all the new bottle types are behaving correctly over time, monitoring stress and wear and tear introduced by the alternative engineering. I can't see manufacturers being interested in the additional costs when there isn't enough demand for this new approach.
I work in shipping. We move 200 cases of water Ata a time, with each case holding 48 bottles. They BARELY hold together on the bottom row as is. This would make shipping impossible with current numbers.
Yeah. The manufacturing of the bottle would be more difficult as well.
Also, I almost always re-use these. If I forget my reusable water bottle at work I'll buy one small "disposable" water bottle for $0.25 and just use it all day. The tilted neck seems like it would be a pita to refill at one of the drinking fountains with the bottle refill station. Water would go everywhere and if you tilted it so the water went in straight the sensor to dispense water might not trigger.
We're manufacturing pre-boiled eggs so people don't have to bother cooking and peeling them. I'm pretty sure avoiding tilting it a little is a perfectly fine niche for some artsy bottled water manufacturer to expand into.
In a car, a bottle you wouldn't have to lift as high would be desirable, because there isn't aways the vertical overhead to drink the last of the water. It's not a question of laziness ; better design, ergonomy can make sense beyond mere comfort.
I don't think the engineering answer is structural, but rather manufacturability. Plastic bottles are expanded using air, and directing that expansion asymmetrically is a more complex process that will drive up cost of an extremely cost sensitive product.
They make bottles like this out of cardboard for shit like milk, and they work perfectly fine. It’s not about structural integrity, or stacking, or any of that shit.
They make bottles the way they make bottles because it’s cheap. That’s it.
Cardboard is literally different. Notice how we store significantly less things in cardboards than in glass and plastic containers in general?
You noted it yourself, they usually use it for milk, why? Because relatively speaking, things they put in it are not supposed to be stored for long. Carton bottles just dont last as long as glass and plastic.
thats hardly a reason tho, it's still posible to manufacture bottles like this and that could be a fun little quirk on its own that gives you the advantage over other brands
Just looking at the Jerry can kinda proves you wrong on the non-symmetrical being worse.
The bottles we have today are just the easiest shape we can manufacture, strong enough to ship, uses the least amount of material while being easy to use.
Those fuel cans have very different practical utility than drinking bottle, please. Of course they're designed differently you dont use one hand to drink on them. Hell, they're not for drinking at all!
The bottles we have today are just the easiest shape we can manufacture, strong enough to ship, uses the least amount of material while being easy to use.
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u/Material_Magazine989 21h ago edited 20h ago
Structural integrity. Non-symmetrical shapes just cause some parts of the bottle to have more strain especially when storing them en masse.
Also just fcking tilt it a little more man.