🥤 1915
Design for a Bottle (Coca-Cola contour)
U.S. Patent D48,160 · 1915
From the abstract
The ornamental design for a bottle, as shown.
Note
A design patent — protecting only ornamental appearance, not function — for the Coca-Cola contour bottle. The Coca-Cola Company in 1915 had a problem: imitators. They asked their bottle suppliers for a shape so distinctive it could be 'recognized in the dark, or by feel, even if shattered on the ground.' Earl Dean at Root Glass Company in Terre Haute, Indiana sketched the curves based on (he thought) the cocoa pod — though he had actually been looking at an encyclopedia entry for the cocoa bean. The bottle is one of the few packaging designs ever to be granted trademark protection on shape alone, in 1977.