Leib Celnik

Cork is ubiquitous in modern life, ranging from its humblest use as a material for footbeds in shoes to modern spacecraft insulation. Yet its most prominent use, the bottle stopper, points to a mystery in our common material culture. When did we start using corks in bottles? Better asked, why did we stop using cork stoppers? The common narrative of the modern cork stopper goes that in the seventeenth century, the French monk Dom Pierre Pérignon had a problem.