By 1915, Coca-Cola's biggest problem wasn't competition. It was fraud.
The drink was everywhere, which meant the counterfeits were everywhere too. Competitors were filling plain bottles with imitation cola and selling it as the real thing. Vendors at soda fountains were diluting genuine Coca-Cola at the point of sale. The company was spending money fighting fraud it couldn't keep up with, and ordinary consumers had no reliable way to know if what they were drinking was actually Coca-Cola.
The solution somebody came up with was surprisingly direct: make the bottle impossible to fake. Commission a container so physically distinctive that no one could copy it without being caught, and no customer could confuse it with anything else, even in poor light, even without a label, even broken on the ground.
That last part was in the actual brief.
The Wrong Plant, the Right Shape
Coca-Cola sent the design brief to glass manufacturers across the United States in 1915. The Root Glass Company in Terre Haute, Indiana, took it seriously. Designer Earl Dean and his supervisor Clyde Edwards decided to base the bottle's shape on the plant the drink was named after — something natural, something with an interesting silhouette.
They went to the library and looked up "coca" in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
They found cocoa. Different plant, different continent, completely unrelated to Coca-Cola. But the cocoa pod has a striking shape — wide at the middle, narrow at the neck, ribbed along the sides. Dean sketched a bottle based on that. The winning design of one of the most recognized containers in commercial history was inspired by a plant that has nothing to do with the drink, because the researchers looked at the wrong entry in an encyclopedia.
The first prototype was too wide to be stable on a production line. The revised version kept the distinctive tapered waist but in proportions that would actually work in a bottling plant. Root Glass won the design competition. The bottle went into production in 1916.
The test it passed: The original 1915 brief asked for a bottle recognizable in the dark or when broken. In 1950, Time magazine put the Coca-Cola contour bottle on its cover — one of the only commercial products ever to appear there without a person. The cover line called it "the most recognized commercial object in the world." They weren't wrong.
The First Product Shape Ever Trademarked
Coca-Cola protected the bottle through design patents starting in 1915. That covered them for a while. But patents expire. Trademark protection, properly maintained, doesn't have to.
In 1977, the USPTO granted Coca-Cola a trademark registration for the contour bottle's three-dimensional shape — the physical form of the container itself, independent of any label, text, or color. This was legally unprecedented. Up to that point, the USPTO hadn't registered a product container based purely on its shape. The contour bottle registration changed that, and in doing so created the legal framework that allows product shapes and packaging to function as trademarks today.
To get the registration, Coca-Cola had to prove that consumers, shown only the bottle silhouette with no label, recognized it as Coca-Cola specifically. This wasn't hard to demonstrate. The bottle had been in continuous, massive use for sixty years. It had appeared in Warhol paintings, in court decisions, in cultural references on every continent. The association was as strong as any word trademark.
Why the Shape Could Be Trademarked at All
Here's the thing about product shape trademarks — they're harder to get than they look. There's an extra test the law imposes: the shape can't be "functional." If a shape serves a practical purpose — making something easier to grip, cheaper to manufacture, more efficient to ship — it can't be trademarked. Functionality belongs to everyone.
The contour bottle's waist is, by any practical measure, not optimal. It's slightly awkward to grip compared to a straight cylinder. It uses more glass than necessary for the volume it holds. The shape was designed for recognition, not efficiency. And that apparent impracticality — that decision to prioritize distinctiveness over optimization — is part of why trademark protection applied. The shape serves no functional purpose that a simpler container couldn't serve. It serves one purpose: telling you who made it.
That was exactly what the 1915 brief asked for. The bottle was always meant to be the brand. It just took sixty years and a landmark USPTO decision to make that protection formal.
Earl Dean looked up the wrong word in an encyclopedia. The shape he sketched from a plant that has nothing to do with Coca-Cola became one of the most legally and commercially significant containers in history. Sometimes the wrong research produces exactly the right result.