Coca-Cola Asked for a Bottle Recognizable in the Dark or in Pieces

By 1915, Coca-Cola had a counterfeiting problem. The flat-sided amber bottle the company was using was identical, in form, to the bottles its rivals were filling with imitation cola. Pharmacists who sold soda by the glass had no easy way to keep them apart. On 26 April 1915, the trustees of the Coca-Cola Bottling Association sent a request to roughly ten American glass companies. They wanted a bottle shape so distinct that a customer could recognise it by touch in the dark, or from a single broken fragment lying on the ground.

One of the recipients was the Root Glass Company of Terre Haute, Indiana. The shop foreman, a Swedish immigrant named Alexander Samuelsson, handed the assignment to two of his men: Earl Dean, a 24-year-old bottle designer, and Clyde Edwards, a junior assistant. Samuelsson sent them across town to the Emeline Fairbanks Memorial Library to look up the actual ingredients of Coca-Cola — the kola nut and the coca leaf — for inspiration.

The library encyclopedia did not have illustrations of either. What it did have was a clear engraving of a cocoa pod — the seed pod of the cacao tree, source of chocolate, no botanical relation to coca whatsoever. Dean sketched the pod's elongated form and ribbed surface and went back to the shop. Within weeks they had a hand-blown prototype, narrower at the base than the middle, with the now-familiar vertical fluting. The Root Glass Company filed a patent in Samuelsson's name on 16 November 1915.

The bottle won the bottlers' competition the next spring. Coca-Cola adopted it nationally, and the contour shape was eventually trademarked as a three-dimensional mark — one of very few container shapes ever granted that protection. The whole design rests on an Indiana library having the wrong book on the shelf.