Coca-cola bottle

designer The coca-cola company, 1916. details coca-cola bottles, £4.49 for a six-pack, amazon. Background as witnessed by photos of celebrities as diverse as actor Spencer Tracy, cuban leader Fidel castro and assorted Beatles and Rolling Stones, sipping on a bottle of coke is one of the coolest and most enduring images of the past one hundred years, summoning up the american 20th-century in a single frame. perfectly shaped to fit in a curled palm, it’s as recognisable as any corporate logo and has become as ubiquitous as the fizzy drink itself. Back in the early 1900s, however, coca-cola was only one of many such sodas, colas and beverages produced in the USA. To gain an edge on its competitors, the company’s asa Griggs candler launched a contest for a new bottle design that would make coke stand out from the crowd. his brief was simple, but deceptively clever: ‘we need a bottle that can be recognised when felt in the dark or identified even when broken’. indiana’s Root Glass company got the gig, after its earl R dean saw an illustration of a cocoa plant (coca-cola had nothing to do with cocoa, but the plant’s pod had a strange, appealing shape). Fluted and curved, dean’s design, once tweaked – as it was at first wider in the middle than the base, making it unstable for a conveyor belt – was an instant hit. Since then, an astonishing 300 billion bottles have been produced across the planet, making it one of the most successful consumer packages in the history of humankind. its celebrity status is assured too, with artists such as andy warhol recognising its classless, universal appeal in his silkscreen prints. ‘a coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking,’ warhol once said. we’ll drink to that…