"But the siphon bottles are antiques and that's getting to be a problem."

At least two companies make sleek versions of the old-fashioned siphon bottles.

Now, the best of the handblown Czechoslovakian siphon bottles can fetch up to $10.

Mineral water comes in old-fashioned soda siphon bottles.

Scholz Brothers also sold seltzer in siphon bottles.

The siphon bottles are about as big as one- or two-liter bottles of soda.

For portable 1 litre bottles, the head of the siphon bottle is removed for filling.

Candles flicker under dried plants (at one point I feared a conflagration) amid old soda siphon bottles.

With the other fist, he snatched the siphon bottle from Blendon and swung it at The Shadow's head.

Beyond nostalgia, seltzer in the old-time siphon bottles Mr. Hoppe recycles never goes flat.

Next, Blendon, bringing the siphon bottle for a bludgeon; he picked Ape's head correctly, but missed it with his clumsy swings.

At least not for seltzer cognoscenti, who grew up at a table set with a siphon bottle as certainly as it was set with napkins.

Local seltzer production remained strong through the first half of this century, when the water, sealed in 32-ounce glass siphon bottles, was delivered to homes by wagon or truck.

A siphon bottle (also called a soda syphon or, archaically, a siphoid) is a pressurized bottle with a vent and a valve.

YOU can call seltzer that comes in a home-delivered siphon bottle a refreshing beverage, but that's like calling Proust's madeleine a puffy pastry.

He stood between the spigot and the clanking machine that can turn city water into seltzer at the rate of 1,250 bottles an hour - that's blue bottles, green bottles, real siphon bottles, Sweet George was quick to add.

Among A. M. Cassandre's eight posters incorporating Cubist and photomontage imagery, the rarest is "Wagon-Bar" from 1932, showing a still life of a glass of wine, a loaf of bread and a siphon bottle against the wheel of a train.

Seltzer men also still work in areas like Miami, Chicago and Los Angeles, he said, but the lightweight, inexpensive plastic bottles of club soda and seltzer that became easily available in supermarkets in the late 1960's spelled the decline of siphon bottles.

La Broche One such acolyte is Sergi Arola, whose excellent menu at Madrid's premier restaurant of haute cuisine, La Broche, features many dishes figured out - or at least enhanced - in the lab and with a siphon bottle.

Adrià explored foams created without the addition of cream or egg white; foams are made of a flavoured liquid and an additive (such as lecithin), then aerated through a variety of methods, including whipping with an immersion blender or extrusion from a siphon bottle equipped with NO cartridges.

The siphon bottle that Norman D. Bloom, a 57-year-old cancer surgeon, keeps at the ready on a sideboard in his Mamaroneck stucco reminds him of the days when his immigrant grandparents lived below his family in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn and survived on this European thirst-quenching elixir.