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Famous industrial designer Raymond Loewy described the contour bottle as "a masterpiece of scientific, functional planning" and "one of the classics of packaging history."

The famous Coca-Cola bottle, called the "contour bottle" within the company, but known to some as the "hobble skirt" bottle, was created in 1915 by bottle designer, Earl R. Dean. In 1915, the Coca-Cola Company launched a competition among its bottle suppliers to create a new bottle for the beverage that would distinguish it from other beverage bottles... "a bottle which a person could recognize even if they felt it in the dark, and so shaped that, even if broken, a person could tell at a glance what it was". Chapman J. Root, the company’s president, turned the project over to members of his supervisory staff including company auditor T. Clyde Edwards, plant superintendent Alexander Samuelson and Earl R. Dean, bottle designer and supervisor of the bottle molding room.

Root and his subordinates decided to base the bottle’s design on one of the soda’s two ingredients, the coca leaf or the cola nut, but were unaware of what either ingredient looked like. Dean and Edwards went to the Emeline Fairbanks Memorial Library and were unable to find any information about coca or cola. Instead they were inspired by a picture of the gourd-shaped cocoa pod in the Encyclopedia Britannica which Chapman Root approved as the model for the prototype.

Faced with the upcoming scheduled maintenance of the mold-making machinery, over the next 24 hours Dean sketched out a drawing of the bottle and then created the mold for the prototype. Dean then molded a small number of bottles before the glass-molding machinery was turned off.

Chapman Root approved the prototype bottle and a design patent was issued on the bottle in November, 1915. The bottle was chosen over eleven other entries at the bottler’s convention in 1916 and was on the market the same year. By 1920, Dean’s contoured bottle became the standard for the Coca-Cola Company. Today, the contour Coca-Cola bottle is one of the most recognized packages on the planet..."even in the dark!"

Please visit The Contour Bottle website at www.TheContourBottle.com