Chapter Six:

Inventing Can Be A Snap!

George Faulstich’s passion for invention was most profitably applied in the development of the modern plastic bottle cap. This was not just a single product. Rather, it involved years of creating systems, machines, caps and businesses that established an industry. In his constant tinkering and striving to improve his business, he invented the water industry’s first reusable cap, named “Dew Cap” after his daughter Darma Elaine Winder and the first tamper-evident cap, cap “Cap Snap”. Along the way he was credited with 15 patents for his improvements of caps, as well as helping with many of Sparky’s 17 patents.

To understand where he took the industry one should remember where it was when he started. “Put a cork in it” was the answer in the early days for how to cap water bottles—mainly the 5 gallon bottles used for water coolers. The bottle would be filled, then corked. A piece of colored paper was put over the cork and a rubber band around that. The color of the paper told what kind of water was in the bottle—spring, distilled, etc. Everything was glass bottled and the process was done by hand. It was expensive and time consuming, and the corks tended to be short-lived.

In the bottling operations for containers smaller than five gallons, the screw-on cap replaced the cork. This would be twisted on by hand and then covered by something called a “shrink band.” Put over the cap when it was wet, the shrink band would , when it dried, contract to a tight seal around the cap. There were many problems with this method as well as with the cork it replaced. Not least of all was that they were both labor intensive and slow. That also made production expensive. If bottled water was ever to attract a mass market, a method was needed to fill and cap the water more efficiently.

From the beginning George was tinkering with ways to make his business work better. Black Mountain was the first water company to use plastic containers for its product. George and his managers saw that this lighter, cheaper material was the wave of the future. George had built a filler that would put water in the bottles without unloading them from their cardboard cases. But the capping still required men sitting down to screw on the caps and put on the shrink bands by hand. What was needed was a system that allowed them to fill the bottle and push it through a capping mechanism automatically. The rotary capping systems that did exist, mostly in the milk industry, were expensive and used glass bottles.

The Dew Cap

An early breakthrough in developing a plastic cap was a reusable small closure, the Dew Cap, which was used on 5-gallon containers. The bottles would first be filled with water and then the flexible plastic cap would be snugly fit by hand over the containers. It was a more sanitary, easier to apply, less expensive innovation. The dome-like cushioning on the cap’s top protected the bottle, and the angled sides of the cap made it simpler to remove. When the water cooler was empty, the customer was asked to put the cap back on the used bottle and return it to Black Mountain, where it was sterilized and used again. In late 1957, George filed for a United States patent on his invention, which was granted on his grandson Sparky’s birthday, December 4, 1962 (#3,066,820).

A inline cap sealer is used to seat the caps onto bottles as they travel down the conveyor.

While the breath through in capping, the Dew Cap was only a limited success. It was applied by hand, and the big water companies that were increasingly dominating the industry did not want reusable caps that required equipment for washing and sterilizing. Black Mountain used the cap exclusively on its 5-gallon bottle. The technology was spun off to a new company run by Darma and her husband, Dick Winder. Almost 50 years after its invention, the Dew Cap is still being used on 5-gallon water bottles. It is currently produced by Lenco Molding, a company that Bill and Claudia Leonard started. Even as the patent was granted, George’s restless energy, as always, focused on improving his invention.

The problem George faced is that he had developed a system for filling bottles by the case, but he had to apply the screw cap by hand to each bottle. What he eventually developed was a system that could fill the bottles and then, as they moved forward on the assembly line, push the cap down automatically onto the top of the bottle. Because of George’s fondness for clever names, the snap-on closure was called Cap Snap.

Cap Snap Seal Created an Industry

Cap Snap had a number of advantages. It was the first tamper-evident cap, so called because it was scored along a strip so that the lower part of the cap skirt had to be torn off to open the bottle. This gave the consumer a clear sign if the bottle had previously been opened. After the skirt was torn off, the upper cap remained sealed on the top. It could be removed by prying it off and put back by merely pressing it down. The cap fit plastic or glass bottles. George designed and built the mold that made the plastic cap. He then designed the entire system including the filler that put water in the bottles and the capper that put the cap on the bottles.

Throughout these years George and his managers were relentless in trying to improve the quality and speed of their operations: from manufacturing their closures, to designing the equipment that made them, to automating the application of the caps. On February 11, 1964, George filed for a patent (#3,120,900) on the original Cap Snap. It was modified three years later with a cap that used two grooves around the side of the bottle to fit into two lips on the interior of the cap (3,338,446, patented on August 29, 1967). This provided the cap in the bottling process was considerably easier than with its predecessor. A year later George filed for yet another patent, this one applying the same techniques for a tearable cap to be used on 5-gallon bottles (#3,392,860).

The corporation George formed to manufacture and market these new caps was called Cap Snap Seal. Another company, C&R Plastics was set up to manufacture the plastic caps, which were then sold to Cap Snap. They made the cappers that put the caps on the bottles and marketed both the caps and the equipment. C&R Plastics was given to daughter Carol and her husband, Russ Scarioni. It was eventually absorbed into Cap Snap Seal. The company was first given to George’s daughter Shirley and her husband Gene Brown. In 1965, the company was divided among George, Altha and their three daughters. Eventually, George gave his shares to Sparky. By the end of his life, besides a little stock in Black Mountain, George didn’t own any of his companies. He owned no stock in Cap Snap Seal, Inc. and held no interest in Three Sisters Ranch Enterprises, LLC, the real estate partnership that controlled the family’s extensive property holdings.

Cap Snap Seal was located on the Alameda property until 1973, sharing both space and management with Black Mountain. Eventually it was moved to Menlo Park and after that to San Jose in 1982. Cap Snap was not only making various caps, it was also producing the equipment to make those caps as well as designing and improving all the systems involved in both the closure and water businesses. In addition, George and Altha lived on the property, along with varying numbers of their extended family. It must have been a busy place.

Cap Snap Seal was located in San Jose, CA and Kingsport, TN

The Cap Snap business soon took off. They were selling to competitors in the water business, to dairies, to juice makers and to other bottlers. Competitors became customers. The plan manager at Arrowhead, a southern California rival in the water business, had first suggested that they develop a new 5-gallon cap. Arrowhead had been using a beer cap on their bottles and it meant each driver had to have a big beer key to get the cap off. It was not only an annoyance, it also used to chip the glass bottles they were using. This led Cap Snap Seal to develop a 5-gallon snap cap that Arrowhead could use. George and others began working with a technician familiar with injection-molding machines for making the plastic caps. Soon the technician’s garage in Watsonville was the center of Operation for Cap Snap. The finished caps were stored in his barn next door and shipped from there.

This quality of working without pretense or a lot of elaborate support extended to much of the business. Ross Markley illustrated this seat-of-the-pants style in his recollections of the first annual trade show of the International Bottled Water Association in Las Vegas that he attened, in 1964.

I took George’s Cadillac and rented a trailer and put one of our fillers on the this thing and went off to Vegas. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing…and we showed it to the industry and it was very, very exciting… people liked the simplicity of the system of filling the bottles in the case, capping in the case, the way the cap itself functioned on the bottle, the whole thing...so then we started selling systems around the country.

Making a Market

What Ross found is that their little family-owned water and cap companies had created systems and products that were far ahead of the industry. Technology was not very advanced in the industry at the time and what Black Mountain did was on the cutting edge. The ease of filling the bottles and capping them in the cases saved on labor and time. How these disposable plastic caps fit on their containers and the next way they were removed made for an attractive product. As a result, the company found a ready market for its fillers, cappers, caps and systems.

Soon Cap Snap Seal was not just selling its caps under the protection of their 18-year patents. The capper, which took the cap and automatically put it on the bottle, was also for sale. The company would sell the capper for $1,500 and then sell the caps for $30 per thousand. First they sold them to water companies like Sparkletts and Arrowhead. Then they found themselves selling to the bigger corporations that took over these companies, like Borden’s and Coca-Cola. And since everyone’s business was tied to the cap, the new corporations continued buying the caps and the equipment from their sole supplier-Cap Snap Seal. Ross remembers how excited everyone got when they hit sales of 1 million caps a year. Cap Snap Seal now sells 12 billion caps a year.

Steady Growth at Black Mountain

When Ross Markley arrived at Black Mountain in late 1955, the company had not really changed all that much in the 20 years since its founding. It had remained a small business. Besides George and Bud Hunt there was one staff person in the office-the bookkeeper, Evelyn English. There were five drivers covering five routes, each delivering 80 bottles a day at about a buck a bottle. This produced a company with revenues of around $250,000 a year.

Black Mountain’s size reflected the bottled water industry as a whole. It remained an industry in its infancy. It served wealthy people and offices, with some 80 percent of Black Mountain’s customers are residential. Virtually all of these sales were made by delivery trucks hauling large 5-gallon bottles for water coolers. Customers were hard to get. Bringing in two or three new customers was considered a good week.

Evolution of a Water Business

But the world was changing and Black Mountain would take advantage of the changes. As the economy improved, more people could afford bottled water. As chlorine and fluoride were added to municipal water supplies, more people decided they preferred the taste and purity of spring water. By the early 1960’s Black Mountain began to sell water in grocery stores. The company’s introduction of 1-gallon plastic bottles with easy to use plastic caps made its product increasingly popular. Safeway and other big grocery chains opened accounts. Many of the people who started out buying the water in stores later switched over to having it delivered to their home. They signed up to be regular customers for Black Mountain’s bi-weekly delivery service.

This pickup in business was matched by Black Mountain’s increasing efficiency in managing the expanding operation. George invented an in-case filler that allowed the smaller bottles to be filled within their cardboard containers. He continued to tinker with and improve the automated filling system. He developed an inline system that filled the 5-gallon water bottles using his reusable cap. Soon Black Mountain was automatically filling, capping and stacking twelve bottles at a time.

Black Mountain purchased four semi trucks to deliver the smaller plastic containers to stores. The areas being served expanded as far south as San Jose and as far north as San Francisco. And throughout these years George was putting additions onto the plant and office on his Alameda property.

Cap Snap Seal plant built by Sparky in San Jose

With the start of Cap Snap Seal in 1964, the two companies shared space, people, and equipment for nine years. There continued to be an overlap of people and equipment. George served as president of Cap Snap Seal but continued to be immersed in all his other interests. When Bud Hunt left Black Mountain in the early 1960’s to go into real estate, Ross Markley became president of the water company. George never cared much for titles. He gave up his position in Cap Snap in the mid-1970’s so that Sparky could take over as head of the company. The land on which all these businesses operated was owned by Three Sisters Ranch Enterprises, LLC, with the income from the leases going to the family.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the companies benefited from the boom times. The water and packaging industries kept on growing and George’s companies were on the cutting-edge of that growth. Occasional forays into ventures like fruit drinks had not worked out, and were quickly dropped. Offers to buy Black Mountain, including one from the giant conglomerate, Beatrice Foods, where also briefly considered and dropped. George enjoyed the business too much, never liked selling family assets and was watching his companies prospers.

By the time of George’s death, Black Mountain was operating some 20 routes with 60 employees. When Black Mountain was sold in 2001, it had 85 routes and 275 employees. When Cap Snap Seal was sold to Portola Packaging in 1986, it had plants in Kingsport, Tennessee, and San Jose, California.

Times Change

On June 1, 2001 the Black Mountain customer newsletter, Spring Times, announced the sale of the company to over 70,000 residential and office delivery customers:

Black Mountain is now one of the Great Springs Waters of America

Black Mountain Spring Water is very pleased to announce that we are now part of Great Spring Waters of America. This family of companies consists of our country’s most respected and best loved brands of bottled water, including Calistoga, Arrowhead and now, Black Mountain.

Speaking for Black Mountain, Claudia Leonard, Chair of the Board of Directors and granddaughter of the company’s founder, said “We are thrilled to unite our family firm to this well established, quality company. We know that Great Spring Waters of America shares our commitment to customer service and to the values of our Northern California community and employees. They will keep the quality behind our products and the great delivery team that stands behind our names.”

Black Mountain’s embrace of Great Spring Waters of America is the fulfillment of the dream that our founder, George Washington Faulstich, had when he discovered the cool spring bubbling on his property in 1937. We will continue his dedication to bottling the most delicious spring water and to offering the best customer service. And that means pledging to you the highest quality state-of-the-art bottling facilities and purest bottled water our customers have come to expect. All day, every day.

Upon this solid foundation, Great Spring Waters of America, with the backing of its parent, The Perrier Group, the world’s number one bottled water company, will provide Black Mountain with all the resources necessary to serve a growing customer base. As General Manager Joseph Kirby put it, “Black Mountain’s legacy of quality and customer satisfaction is what our future is based upon. With the leadership and proven success that a customer-focused company like Perrier brings, we can now offer products and services to more Northern California than ever before. Exciting days lie ahead.”

The company’s headquarters were moved to the Perrier Group of America’s West Coast offices in Brea, California, and the Black Mountain building at 1390 El Camino Real was vacated on June 1, 2001. Deliveries never skipped a beat under the transition to new ownership. The heirs of George and Altha were satisfied that selling the company to Perrier, a division of the world’s largest food company, Nestle, was made at the right time.