The Coca-Cola Bottle: Celebrating 100 Years of an American Icon

“A bottle which a person could recognize even if they felt it in the dark”
–Coca-Cola Company, 1915

Today the Coca-Cola bottle is one of the most recognizable containers in the world, but a century ago nearly all soda bottles looked the same. To distinguish its product from competitors, the Coca-Cola Company launched a competition among glassmakers in 1915 to design a new bottle that was distinctive in both look and feel.

The winning design, patented by the Root Glass Company of Terre Haute, Indiana, sought inspiration from two Coca-Cola ingredients: the coca leaf and kola nut. However, the bottle’s fluted contour shape was mistakenly modeled after the cacao pod, the main ingredient in chocolate.

The Coca-Cola Company adopted the Root Glass Company’s bottle design in 1916, but the original prototype was never manufactured because it was top-heavy and unstable. The first commercial “Coke” bottles debuted with a wider base and slimmed-down, contoured shape.

Click here to download “Design patent No. 48,160 for bottle or similar article, November 16, 1915.”

This document was on display in the West Rotunda Gallery of the National Archives in Washington, DC, June 4 through July 29, 2015 and in the East Rotunda Gallery October 29 through December 2, 2015.

The National Archives Museum’s “Featured Document” exhibit is made possible in part by the National Archives Foundation through the generous support of The Coca-Cola Company.

Past Featured Records

Bring Them Home, Uncle Sam
Soldiers arrive home aboard the S.S. Haverford as the transport ship pulls into Philadelphia, 1918. Records of War Department General and Special Staffs On Display 10/31/2024 – 12/4/2024 More than two million American service members were overseas with the American Expeditionary Forces when the guns fell silent on November 11, 1918, ending World War I. Americans would continue to ...
Betty Ford: Raising Breast Cancer Awareness
On Display 10/03/2024 - 10/30/2024 Just weeks after she became First Lady, Betty Ford was diagnosed with breast cancer. On September 26, 1974, doctors discovered a lump in her breast during a routine medical examination. She underwent a mastectomy two days later. Breaking with social conventions of the time, Betty Ford shared her cancer diagnosis with the public. This ...
Title IX
An Act of June 23, 1972, Public Law 92-318, 86 STAT 235, to Amend the Higher Education Act of 1965, the Vocational Educational Act of 1963, the General Education Provisions Act (Creating a National Foundation for Postsecondary Education and a National Institute of Education), the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, Public Law 874, Eighty-First Congress, and Related Acts, ...
Court-Martial record of Lieutenant Frederick Gotthold Enslin, March 10, 1778.
On March 10, 1778, Lieutenant Frederick Gotthold Enslin became the first U.S. soldier court-martialed for “attempting to commit sodomy” with another soldier. His sentence was to be literally drummed out of the Continental Army by its regiments’ fifes and drums. Enslin was told “never to return.” More than 230 years after Enslin’s court martial, gay men, lesbians, ...
Indictment for illegal voting, 1872
Susan B. Anthony devoted more than fifty years of her life to the cause of woman suffrage. After casting her ballot in the 1872 Presidential election in her hometown of Rochester, New York, she was arrested, indicted, tried, and convicted for voting illegally. At her two-day trial in June 1873, which she later described as "the greatest judicial outrage ...