The Cork and the Bottle That Held Pressure
Coming to Wonder Inventions on 10 December 2026.
In the 1660s, ten-year-old Nell Vane and her master glassblower Toby Kemp make bottles in the smoky coal-fired glass cones of Newcastle upon Tyne, where England's 1615 ban on wood fuel has forced furnaces hotter than ever — hot enough to make dark green glass strong enough to hold a storm inside it. When a crate of weak old wood-fired bottles bursts on the hillside, Nell and Toby decide their new coal-fired bottles must prove themselves, and they carry them by keelboat, ship and cart across the Channel to the Abbey of Hautvillers in Champagne, where a short, bespectacled monk called Dom Pérignon is losing barrels of fizzing wine every spring. In the chalk cellars the bottles hold — but the wooden pegs and wax stoppers shoot out like arrows and the wine spills. It takes a hungry donkey, a bale of Spanish cork bark and a tall girl with hemp twine wound up her arm to finish the puzzle: cork squeezed in tight and lashed down with knotted hemp. The story ends at sunrise on the banks of the Marne, as the first corked, caged bottles are loaded onto a barge for Paris.
About this story
- Length
- 10 illustrated pages
Who appears
- Nell Vane — Glasshouse apprentice, ten years old, the story's engine
- Toby Kemp — Master glassblower of the Newcastle glass cone, Nell's teacher
- Margot Thibault — French carter's daughter from Champagne who drives the abbey cart
- Dom Pérignon — Cellarer monk of Hautvillers Abbey, keeper of the wine
- Biscuit — The abbey's cart donkey, greedy and helpful by accident
What happens on 10 December 2026
This story is finished and scheduled. On 10 December 2026 it opens here in full — every page illustrated, with narration you can listen to — as part of Wonder Inventions. Nothing on this page is a placeholder: the story exists, it has been reviewed, and this is its address.
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