The move to bottle feeding was in the VICTORIAN ERA. That's about six generations ago.
I found a feeder from ~450BC that was used to to feed baby wine and honey. Nevertheless, bottle feeding never amounted to much until Playtex's invention in the '50s. Sales before that were on the order of thousands of units/year in the late '20s. The earlier Victorian era inventions were used for preemies and other difficult feeding cases. Most docs never recommended them, even in the early 1/3 of the 20th century for general use, because they were extremely unsanitary.