At the beginning of the nineteenth century, most bottles in the United States and England were either free-blown—formed on the end of a blowpipe without aid of a mold—or blown into a one-piece “dip mold” that formed only the basic body shape. Neither of these processes allowed large-scale production of oddly shaped or embossed containers, and since even dip-molded bottles were formed by hand above the shoulder, the bottles tended to be asymmetrical. Hinged two-piece molds, capable of shaping the shoulder and neck as well as the body of the bottle, had occasionally been used in England as early as the 1750s, but they did not become common in the U. S. until the second and third decades of the nineteenth century. A three-piece mold with a dip body and hinged neck and shoulder parts, developed in England shortly after the turn of the century, was popularized by an 1821 patent taken out by the Henry Ricketts Company of Bristol. These two forms, especially the two-piece mold, remained the most common mold types throughout the nineteenth century. On early two-piece molds, the pieces were hinged in the center of the base, but a more stable mold with a separate base part was developed by the late 1850s and was almost universally used in the later decades of the century. On almost all mouth-blown bottles, whether free-blown or blown in a complex mold, the lip and upper neck were formed in a separate process after the otherwise complete article had been removed from the blowpipe. This process, the last step in the formation of the bottle, was known as “finishing,” and the completed lip came to be called the “finish.” In the early part of the nineteenth century, bottles were finished with simple hand tools such as shears, but by 1840, a specialized “lipping tool” with a central plug and one or more rotating external arms had been introduced. This tool produced a smoother and more uniform finish, and remained in use until the industry was fully automated in the twentieth century. While the finish was being formed, most bottles were held by an iron pontil rod affixed to the base with molten glass. This process left a rough scar on the bottom of the bottle where the pontil had been detached. Holding devices which gripped the body of the bottle and eliminated the need for empontilling were apparently known in England in the 1820s, but did not become common in American glasshouses until the 1840s or 50s. By the 1870s use of the pontil rod had almost entirely ceased. The most significant American contribution to the early nineteenth century glass industry was the development in the 1820s of the hand-operated side-lever pressing machine. This device consisted of a single- or multi-piece mold into which the glass was pressed by means of a plunger. Since the plunging process required wide-mouthed molds, pressing was used primarily for glass tableware, although straight-sided jars were also pressed in the later part of the century.