From Error to Icon

     This year we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the familiar Coca-Cola bottle.  It is just as recognizable as the product logo itself.

     In 1885 Georgia businessman Asa Griggs Candler was the majority stockholder of the fledgling Coca Cola Company.  But by the turn of the century there were literally hundreds of other competitors in the carbonated beverage market.  In 1915 he launched a national competition to develop a new bottle design that would set it apart.

     The Root Glass Company in Indiana decided to base their entry into the competition using a word play on the Coca-Cola name.  While doing research mold shop supervisor Earl Dean came across an illustration of the cocoa plant and its seed pod.  Even though the caramel colored soda has nothing to do with that plant, the pod had a strange but appealing shape.  Their submission of the contour bottle in the shape of a cocoa pod won the competition and is now, one hundred years later, one of the most recognized objects on the planet.