Yesterday I thought I'd be clever and empty the stinky old Palmolive aftershave from the '50s and refill with Aqua Velva blue, which I did. This glass bottle even had a small rectangular window on the front which perfectly fit the cutout Aqua Velva logo which I took from the plastic bottle. It looked really sharp. This morning I woke to the strong smell of fresh AV in my bathroom. I couldn't figure out where it was coming from until I noticed the bottle was empty. It was right where I left it standing the night before but the back corner of the thing was blown out. It did not fall off, was not moved, nor was it damaged in any way -- I know the bottle was very much intact when I was scraping off the old label before refilling it. No joke, it just...shattered. All by itself. Very weird. Theories welcome.
I'm sorry you lost your cool vintage AS bottle. Google spontaneous glass breakage, and you can read about the well-known mechanism for tempered glass breakage. That wouldn't seem to apply here, but it was interesting to read. And as expected, you'll find all the weird stories about ghosts causing glass to break on its own...next idea... I'd guess that the your 60-year-old glass bottle had some type of manufacturing defect that you didn't notice, or it had been dropped or bumped during its lifetime, or possibly it was caused by a thermal cycle at some point. Or maybe some combination of these factors.
Well, there are multiple theories in matters such as these, mostly dealing with parallel universes and string theory. Aliens have been known to enter this plane of existence at odd times and places. It sounds to me like an alien being crossed the space time continuum in your bathroom, knocked over the bottle, broke it, had just enough time to splash a little on (to impress the lady aliens), but not enough time to clean up the broken glass before he was sucked into whatever parallel universe he came from. The other possibility is gremlins. My money is on the alien theory.
Just another thing that keeps me up at night worrying... probably got dinged a time or two and had a week spot after all the handling it split.
In the middle of the night vs while I held it and scraped off the old label...I really should consider myself lucky!
Changes in temperature can aggravate a flaw in glass also. I've had a couple windshields that went from a small pit to a full blown crack over night. Just one of those PITA things...