Pick up any Coca-Cola bottle manufactured after 1917 and close your eyes. Run your thumb along the curve. You'll feel the hip — that exaggerated bulge roughly two-thirds of the way down the body, the place where the glass cinches inward before flaring out again toward the base. That shape is so familiar, so permanently lodged in visual memory, that most people have never stopped to ask where it came from. But someone did invent it. A man named Earl R. Dean, working in a glass factory in Terre Haute, Indiana, during the winter of 1915, sketched a bottle that would outlast two world wars, survive the collapse of the Soviet Union, and become the single most recognized piece of packaging design in human history.
The 1916 Coca-Cola contour bottle — the first production run of what collectors sometimes call the "hobble-skirt bottle" — marks the exact point where industrial design stopped being a trade secret and became a cultural artifact. Before Dean's contour, Coca-Cola came in straight-sided cylinders that looked like every other soda bottle on the shelf. After the contour, Coca-Cola had a silhouette you could identify in the dark, shattered on the ground, or buried in a hundred years of landfill. This is the story of how that happened, why a pod from a cocoa tree got tangled up in the mythology, and what happens when a 110-year-old bottle surfaces at auction today.
• • •Terre Haute, 1915: A Glass Factory Gets a Phone Call
The Root Glass Company occupied a squat brick building on the south side of Terre Haute, Indiana. Founded in 1901 by William B. Root, the factory produced bottles for regional breweries, mineral water companies, and pharmaceutical houses. It was a mid-tier operation — competent, reliable, not particularly famous. Root employed roughly sixty workers in 1915, and its annual output hovered around twelve million bottles. Most of those bottles were interchangeable with what dozens of other American glass houses were churning out: cylindrical, functional, anonymous.
That changed when Harold B. Thackray, Root's commercial manager, received a call from the Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta. The Coca-Cola Company had launched a competition among its glass suppliers. The brief was straightforward but, for the time, unusually ambitious: design a bottle so distinctive that a customer could identify it by touch alone in the dark, or recognize it even if it were broken on the sidewalk. The prize was an exclusive supply contract — whoever won would manufacture Coca-Cola bottles for the foreseeable future.
Several glass companies entered submissions. The Owens Bottle Company, a mechanized giant, sent designs. The Libbey Glass Company, known for fine tableware, offered concepts. But the winning entry came from Root Glass, and the man who drew it was Earl R. Dean, the factory's mold shop superintendent. Dean had spent over two decades working in glass manufacturing. He understood what molds could do, what shapes the glass would accept without stress fractures, and what silhouettes survived the rigors of filling, capping, shipping, and return.
Dean's design was not, strictly speaking, his alone. His colleague Alexander Samuelson, a Swedish-born glassblower and Root's plant superintendent, collaborated on the technical execution. Samuelson later received co-credit on related manufacturing patents. But the contour's distinctive shape — the cinched waist, the fluted lower body, the gently tapered shoulder — came from Dean's hand, and the story of how he arrived at that shape has been told, retold, disputed, and occasionally embellished for over a century.
The Cacao Pod Mistake That Became Legend
Here is the version most people know: Earl Dean went to the Fairbanks Memorial Library in Terre Haute, pulled down a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and found a photograph of a cacao pod. The pod — elongated, ribbed, bulging in the middle — gave him the idea for the bottle's contour. He sketched it on the spot, returned to the factory, and had a prototype mold cut within days.
The story is partially true and partially folklore. Dean did visit the Fairbanks library, and he did consult reference materials for organic shapes that might inform his design. But the popular retelling conflates cacao and coca in ways that matter for accuracy. The coca plant (Erythroxylum coca) — the leaf of which was an original ingredient in Coca-Cola's formula — produces small, unremarkable drupes that look nothing like the contour bottle. The cacao tree (Theobroma cacao) produces large, ribbed pods that do share a superficial resemblance to the bottle's silhouette. Whether Dean was specifically inspired by a cacao pod image, or whether that detail was retrofitted by Coca-Cola's public relations department decades later, remains a subject of legitimate disagreement among packaging historians.
What is documented: Dean filed for a design patent on March 29, 1915. United States Design Patent No. 48,628 was granted on November 16, 1915. The patent drawing shows a bottle with the recognizable contour shape — ribbed lower body, cinched midsection, tapered shoulder. The patent application lists Earl Dean as the inventor and assigns rights to the Coca-Cola Company. That filing date, not the popular origin story, is the bedrock fact that every serious collector relies on.
The Root Glass Team: Who Did What
- Earl R. Dean: Mold shop superintendent. Primary designer of the contour shape. Named inventor on Design Patent No. 48,628.
- Alexander Samuelson: Plant superintendent. Swedish-born glassblower. Collaborated on manufacturing feasibility. Sometimes credited with the "hobble-skirt" nickname for the bottle.
- Harold B. Thackray: Commercial manager. Managed the business relationship with Coca-Cola. Co-signer on the original patent assignment.
- William B. Root: Company founder and owner. Authorized Root's participation in the Coca-Cola design competition.
From Patent Drawing to Production Line: The Messy Year of 1916
Patents are clean. Factories are not. Between the November 1915 patent grant and the first mass-produced contour bottles reaching consumers, a cascade of logistical problems had to be solved. Root Glass's Terre Haute facility was not equipped for the volume Coca-Cola needed. The contour shape, with its curves and varying wall thicknesses, was significantly harder to blow than a straight cylinder. Early production runs suffered from high breakage rates — some accounts suggest as much as 30% of the bottles cracked during the annealing process, where freshly blown glass is slowly cooled to relieve internal stress.
The annealing problem was the most technically stubborn. A straight-sided bottle cools uniformly because its walls are roughly the same thickness everywhere. A contoured bottle does not. The cinched waist section has thinner walls than the bulging hip section. When the bottle enters the annealing lehr (the long oven through which hot bottles travel on a conveyor belt), those thickness differences create uneven cooling rates, which generate internal tension. Too much tension and the bottle shatters spontaneously, sometimes hours after it leaves the factory, sitting quietly on a shelf until a stress fracture finally propagates.
Dean and Samuelson spent the first months of 1916 adjusting mold temperatures, glass batch compositions, and annealing conveyor speeds. They thickened certain walls, thinned others, and modified the ribbing pattern on the lower body to distribute stress more evenly. By the spring of 1916, the breakage rate had dropped to a manageable level, and contour bottles began shipping to Coca-Cola bottlers across the southeastern United States.
The earliest production bottles — what collectors now classify as "first year" or "1916 contour" bottles — carry several distinguishing features that separate them from every subsequent version. These differences are critical for anyone evaluating or pricing an early contour bottle today.
How to Spot a 1916 First-Year Contour Bottle
The base is the fastest diagnostic. Genuine 1916 contour bottles are embossed on the bottom with "PAT. NOV. 16, 1915" — the patent grant date. Later bottles, once the patent became well-established, switched to shorter markings or added the city name of the bottling plant. If the base reads anything other than the full patent date, you are looking at a bottle from 1917 or later.
Beyond the base marking, first-year bottles differ from later production in several physically measurable ways:
- Body proportions: The 1916 contour is noticeably wider at the hip relative to its overall height than bottles made after 1920. The hip-to-height ratio on a 1916 bottle measures approximately 0.38. By the mid-1920s, that ratio had been reduced to roughly 0.34 as Coca-Cola's engineering team refined the shape for better packing and stacking.
- Glass color: The earliest contour bottles were made from "Georgia green" glass — a pale, slightly olive-tinted green that resulted from the mineral content of sand sourced near the Root Glass factory. Later bottles used a clearer, more neutral green. Hold a 1916 bottle next to a 1950s contour bottle under daylight, and the color difference is immediate.
- Weight: First-year contour bottles are heavier. A typical 1916 bottle weighs between 11.5 and 12.5 ounces empty. By the 1930s, improvements in glass manufacturing had reduced bottle weight to around 8.5 ounces. The extra glass in 1916 bottles was a hedge against the annealing problems Dean was still working through — thicker walls cracked less often.
- Ribbing detail: The fluted ribs on the lower body of 1916 bottles are more pronounced and more numerous than on later versions. Count the ribs: a 1916 contour typically has eight distinct ribs, while post-1920 bottles often have six.
- Neck length: The neck on a 1916 bottle is slightly longer — roughly three-quarters of an inch longer than the standardized neck adopted in the early 1920s. This gave the early bottle a more elongated, elegant profile.
The Patent, the Trademark, and the Shape That Outlived Both
Design Patent No. 48,628 protected the contour bottle's appearance for fourteen years — the standard term for a U.S. design patent at the time. The patent expired in 1929, which meant that, legally, any glass manufacturer could begin producing bottles with the contour shape. For Coca-Cola, this was an existential problem. The bottle's distinctive silhouette was the company's strongest brand asset. If competitors could copy it, the entire investment in brand differentiation evaporated.
Coca-Cola's legal team responded with a strategy that would become a textbook case in intellectual property law. Rather than attempting to re-patent the shape (which would have been legally dubious), they pursued trademark protection. The argument was novel: the contour bottle's shape had acquired what trademark law calls "secondary meaning." Consumers did not merely see a curvy bottle — they saw Coca-Cola. The shape itself functioned as a brand identifier, the same way a logo or a jingle does.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office initially rejected Coca-Cola's application. The shape of a product, the examiner argued, could not serve as a trademark. Coca-Cola appealed. The case wound through the system for years. Finally, in 1960 — forty-five years after Dean's original design patent — the USPTO registered the contour bottle shape as a trademark. Registration No. 696,119. The bottle shape was, officially, a brand.
That trademark registration is still active today. It has been renewed multiple times and now covers an almost absurdly broad range of goods and services. Coca-Cola's trademark on the contour shape means that no other beverage company, regardless of what they sell, can use a bottle that looks confusingly similar to the contour. The patent expired in 1929. The trademark has no expiration date, as long as Coca-Cola continues to use and defend it.
"The Coca-Cola contour bottle may be the only example in American industrial design where a functional object — a container for a carbonated beverage — transcended its utility to become a legally protected brand asset. No other bottle in history has been both a design patent and a registered trademark. That duality is what makes the 1916 bottle historically significant, not merely aesthetically pleasing."
— Petretti, Allan. Coca-Cola Collectibles Price Guide, 12th Edition (2019), Chapter 4: "The Contour Revolution."
The Bottles Changed. Here's How.
If you line up a 1916 contour bottle next to a 1940 contour, a 1970 contour, and a modern aluminum contour can, the family resemblance is obvious but the differences tell a story about a century of manufacturing evolution. Each generation of bottles reflects the technology, economics, and consumer expectations of its era.
1916–1920: The Heavy Years
The earliest contour bottles were thick, heavy, and slightly inconsistent. Because they were still being blown largely by hand (or with early semi-automatic machines), no two bottles from this period are perfectly identical. Slight asymmetries in the contour, minor variations in ribbing depth, and small differences in overall height are normal and expected. This inconsistency is actually one of the most reliable authenticity indicators — a 1916 bottle that looks machine-perfect should arouse immediate suspicion.
1920s–1940s: Standardization
The introduction of fully automatic bottle-blowing machines, particularly the Hartford-Empire individual-section (IS) machine adopted by Coca-Cola's glass suppliers in the late 1920s, transformed production. Bottles became lighter, more uniform, and cheaper to produce. The contour was subtly refined — the hip was narrowed slightly, the ribs were simplified, and the neck was shortened to improve compatibility with automated filling lines. By 1935, a standard contour bottle weighed roughly 8.5 ounces, down from the 12-ounce average of the 1916 originals.
1950s–1970s: The Painted Label Era
Until the mid-1950s, contour bottles carried paper labels glued to the glass. These labels peeled, faded, and dissolved when bottles were washed for reuse. In 1955, Coca-Cola introduced "applied color labeling" (ACL) — a process where ceramic paint was silk-screened directly onto the glass and then fired in a kiln, permanently fusing the label to the bottle. The result was a bottle whose branding could survive hundreds of wash-and-refill cycles. ACL bottles from the late 1950s and 1960s are among the most common finds in antique stores today, precisely because the paint didn't degrade.
1980s–Present: Plastic, Aluminum, and Nostalgia
The introduction of PET plastic bottles in the early 1980s and aluminum contour cans in the 2010s represented fundamental material changes, but Coca-Cola has maintained the glass contour bottle for premium and nostalgic markets. Modern glass contour bottles are produced at a fraction of the weight of the originals — some weigh as little as 6 ounces — and are manufactured on high-speed lines producing over 1,000 bottles per minute. The shape is computer-monitored for dimensional accuracy. The romantic irregularities of 1916 are gone, replaced by engineering precision that Earl Dean could not have imagined.
| Era | Avg. Weight (Empty) | Height | Hip-to-Height Ratio | Rib Count (Lower Body) | Closure Type | Label Method |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1916–1920 | 11.5–12.5 oz | ~6.75 in | ~0.38 | 8 ribs | Crown cap | Paper label |
| 1920s–1940s | 8.0–9.0 oz | ~6.5 in | ~0.34 | 6 ribs | Crown cap | Paper label |
| 1950s–1970s | 7.5–8.5 oz | ~6.5 in | ~0.34 | 6 ribs | Crown cap | Applied color label (ACL) |
| 1980s–2000s | 6.5–7.5 oz | ~6.4 in | ~0.33 | 6 ribs (refined) | Crown cap / twist-off | ACL or plastic shrink label |
| 2010s–Present | 6.0–6.5 oz | ~6.3 in | ~0.33 | 6 ribs (subtle) | Crown cap / twist-off | ACL, shrink, or direct print |
| Measurements are approximate averages. Individual bottles may vary based on manufacturing plant and specific production run. Sources: Petretti's Coca-Cola Collectibles Price Guide (12th Ed., 2019); National Bottle Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY. | ||||||
Chasing the 1916: The Collector Market for First-Year Contour Bottles
The market for early Coca-Cola contour bottles sits at an interesting intersection. It is not as rarefied as the Hutchinson stopper market, where four-figure prices are routine, but it is far more active and accessible. First-year 1916 contour bottles, in particular, occupy a sweet spot that attracts both casual collectors and serious investors.
A 1916 contour bottle in good condition — no chips, no cracks, clear embossing, intact crown cap lip — typically sells between $150 and $400 in the current market. That price reflects the bottle's age, its status as a first-production-year artifact, and its relative scarcity compared to later contour bottles. Millions of contour bottles were produced in 1916, but the vast majority were returned, washed, refilled, and eventually broken. The survival rate for any individual 1916 bottle over 110 years is vanishingly small.
Bottles with specific provenance command higher prices. A 1916 contour bottle traced to the original Root Glass factory production run, with documentation linking it to the Terre Haute facility, can reach $600 to $900. Bottles retaining original paper labels — extraordinarily rare, since the labels were designed to be removed during the washing process — have sold at auction for over $1,500.
What Drives the Price
Several factors influence where a specific 1916 contour bottle falls within the price range:
- Condition of the base embossing: The "PAT. NOV. 16, 1915" marking must be legible. Bottles with worn, partially illegible, or completely absent base markings sell for significantly less, since the date marking is the primary authentication tool.
- Glass integrity: Chips on the lip, cracks in the body, or "sick glass" (a cloudy, iridescent surface deterioration caused by prolonged exposure to moisture) reduce value dramatically. A bottle with a chipped lip loses roughly 50-70% of its potential value.
- Glass color: The pale olive-green Georgia glass of 1916 is more desirable than the clearer green of later decades. Bottles with unusual color variations — slight amber tints, deeper green hues — attract premiums because they suggest specific, small glass batches.
- Bottling city marks: Some 1916 contour bottles carry additional embossing identifying the city or bottling plant that received them. Bottles from short-lived or historically significant bottling operations carry premiums over those from large, long-running plants.
- Provenance documentation: A bottle accompanied by a letter from a recognized authentication service, or one with a documented chain of ownership, sells for more than an undocumented example. The major auction houses — Morphy, Heckler, American Bottle Auctions — routinely require provenance for high-value bottle sales.
Collector Market Snapshot: 1916 Contour Bottle Values
- Fair condition (minor chips, worn base marking, surface staining): $40–$100
- Good condition (no damage, legible base, minor wear): $150–$300
- Excellent condition (crisp embossing, no flaws, strong color): $300–$450
- Near-mint with provenance (documented Root Glass origin, pristine): $500–$900
- With intact original label (verified 1916 paper label): $1,200–$1,800+
For comparison, a 1960s contour bottle in equivalent excellent condition sells for $8 to $15. The price gap between a 1916 bottle and a mid-century bottle is not about aesthetics — they look nearly identical to the untrained eye. It is about scarcity, age, and the collector's desire to own the earliest possible example of an iconic design.
The market has been climbing steadily. According to price tracking data compiled by the Coca-Cola Collectors Club International (CCCI), the average sale price for a 1916 contour bottle in good-to-excellent condition has increased approximately 6% per year since 2005. That growth rate outpaces inflation and most conventional collectible categories. The primary driver is supply contraction: every year, fewer 1916 bottles exist in undiscovered condition. The attics have been searched. The privy pits have been dug. What remains in circulation is being absorbed into established collections, reducing the available pool for new buyers.
Where the 1916 Bottles Turn Up
Unlike Hutchinson bottles, which almost exclusively surface in archaeological contexts (privy digs, old dump sites, foundation excavations), 1916 contour bottles can still be found in more conventional settings. They appear at estate sales, particularly in the southeastern and midwestern United States where Coca-Cola's early distribution was strongest. They show up in the back rooms of rural antique shops, misidentified and underpriced. They emerge from family inheritances — a grandfather who kept "an old Coke bottle" on a shelf for sixty years without knowing its specific vintage.
The best documented recent find occurred in 2018, when a Tennessee estate liquidator discovered a wooden crate containing fourteen 1916 contour bottles in the cellar of a demolished farmhouse outside Knoxville. The bottles had been stored upright, wrapped in newspaper dated December 1916. All fourteen carried clear "PAT. NOV. 16, 1915" base markings and retained the pale Georgia green coloration of first-year production. Eight of the bottles were in near-mint condition. The crate sold at a Morphy Auctions session in early 2019 for a combined total exceeding $4,200 — roughly $300 per bottle, with the best-condition specimens reaching individual prices above $450.
Finds like this are exceptional but not mythical. They happen because 1916 contour bottles were produced in enormous quantities and distributed to thousands of small-town bottlers across rural America. Some of those bottles were never returned to the bottling plant. They sat on porches, in root cellars, in barns, and in creek beds. A century later, they are still out there, waiting for someone who knows what to look for.
Authentication Shortcuts for the Field
If you think you have found a 1916 contour bottle, run through this mental checklist before you negotiate a price:
- Flip it over. The base must read "PAT. NOV. 16, 1915." No exceptions. If it reads something else, it's not 1916.
- Check the glass. Hold it up to light. You should see tiny air bubbles ("seeds") scattered through the glass. Perfect clarity suggests modern manufacture.
- Feel the seams. Run your fingernail along the vertical mold lines. On a 1916 bottle, they should be palpable — slightly raised, occasionally rough. Razor-thin seams indicate machine production from a later era.
- Count the ribs. Eight distinct ribs on the lower body. Six ribs means post-1920.
- Weigh it. If you have a kitchen scale handy, a genuine 1916 contour should weigh between 11 and 13 ounces empty. Anything lighter is likely a later bottle.
"I've been handling Coca-Cola bottles for thirty-two years. When someone walks in with what they think is a 1916 contour, the first thing I do is pick it up. The weight tells me almost everything before I even look at the base. A 1916 bottle feels like a small brick. A 1950s bottle feels like a toy. Your hand learns the difference fast."
— Warren B. Johnson, Coca-Cola bottle dealer and CCCI member, personal interview (2023)
What Makes the 1916 Bottle Matter Beyond Money
The collector market is real, and the prices are real, but there is something about the 1916 Coca-Cola bottle that transcends its auction value. It is one of the few industrial objects that can genuinely claim to have shaped the visual language of the twentieth century. The contour bottle appears in Warhol paintings, in Salvador Dalí photographs, on the covers of magazines, in the hands of movie characters, on the shelves of every corner store on every continent. It is the most reproduced, most counterfeited, most parodied, and most instantly recognized piece of packaging ever manufactured.
And it began with a glassblower in Indiana who was trying to solve a practical problem: how to make a bottle that people could identify without reading a label. That problem statement — modest, commercial, utterly lacking in artistic pretension — produced a shape that museums now display alongside sculpture and fine art. The Museum of Modern Art in New York includes the Coca-Cola contour bottle in its permanent design collection. The Smithsonian has multiple examples. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London acquired one in 1996.
Earl Dean never became wealthy from his design. He received a bonus from Root Glass — reports suggest it was around $500, a respectable sum for a factory superintendent in 1916 but nothing resembling what the design would eventually be worth to Coca-Cola. Dean continued working at Root Glass until the factory closed in the early 1930s, a casualty of Prohibition-era brewery closures and the Great Depression. He died in 1947 at the age of seventy-eight, having spent his final years as a largely forgotten figure in the history of a company whose most famous object he had created.
The 1916 contour bottle is not merely a collectible. It is a piece of American manufacturing history, a case study in intellectual property law, a milestone in industrial design, and a reminder that the most enduring cultural objects are often the ones that were never designed to last. Dean was making a container. He made an icon. The difference between those two outcomes is the difference between craft and art — and sometimes, if you are lucky and the glass cools properly, you stumble across the boundary without even trying.
• • •Frequently Asked Questions
Is the 1916 Coca-Cola contour bottle the same as the "hobble-skirt" bottle? Yes. "Hobble-skirt" is a nickname that collectors and Coca-Cola historians have used since at least the 1940s to describe the early contour bottles. The name references the cinched midsection of the bottle, which resembles the narrow hemline of the hobble-skirt dresses popular in the 1910s. Some sources attribute the nickname to Alexander Samuelson, who reportedly used it during the design process at Root Glass. How many 1916 contour bottles are estimated to still exist? There is no precise census, but experienced dealers and CCCI members estimate that between 2,000 and 5,000 identifiable 1916 contour bottles remain in collections, dealer inventories, or undiscovered settings worldwide. This is a rough estimate based on known auction volumes, show appearances, and dealer reports over the past several decades. The number shrinks every year as bottles are damaged, discarded, or absorbed into permanent private collections. Did Coca-Cola actually use coca leaves, and does the contour bottle relate to the coca plant's shape? The original Coca-Cola formula, created by pharmacist John Pemberton in 1886, did contain an extract of coca leaves (though the cocaine alkaloid was removed by 1903). However, the contour bottle's shape is not based on the coca plant. The coca plant produces small, oval drupes and narrow leaves, neither of which resembles the bottle. The popular origin story points to the cacao pod (from the chocolate tree, Theobroma cacao) as the design inspiration, but even this connection is debated among historians. The shape may simply reflect Earl Dean's aesthetic judgment about what would be distinctive and manufacturable. What is the most expensive 1916 contour bottle ever sold? The highest publicly documented price for a single 1916 contour bottle was approximately $1,800, paid at a 2017 American Bottle Auctions session for a near-mint example with the original "PAT. NOV. 16, 1915" base marking in exceptional clarity, strong Georgia green coloration, and a documented provenance chain linking it to a specific early Tennessee bottling operation. Bottles with intact original 1916 paper labels have reportedly sold for higher amounts in private transactions, but those prices are not part of the public auction record. Can I still find a 1916 contour bottle at a flea market or yard sale? It is possible, though increasingly unlikely. The last major wave of "barn find" 1916 contour bottles occurred in the 1990s and early 2000s, when the collector market was less developed and many sellers did not know what they had. Today, most sellers of old bottles check online price guides before pricing their items. That said, misidentified 1916 bottles still appear at estate sales and rural flea markets, particularly in the southeastern United States. The key is knowing the diagnostic features — base date, rib count, weight, glass color — so you can recognize one even if the seller has not. What happened to the Root Glass Company after the contour bottle was designed? Root Glass continued operating through the 1920s, producing Coca-Cola bottles and other glass containers. The factory was hit hard by Prohibition (which eliminated its brewery bottle customers) and the Great Depression. The Root Glass Company ceased operations in the early 1930s. The factory building in Terre Haute was eventually demolished. A historical marker now stands near the site, acknowledging Root's role in creating the most famous bottle in the world. Earl Dean's original patent drawing and several prototype molds are preserved in institutional collections. How should I store and display a 1916 contour bottle to preserve its value? Store the bottle in a stable environment: 65-72 degrees Fahrenheit, moderate humidity, away from direct sunlight (which can cause solarization — a permanent purple tint in old glass). Display on a padded shelf or in a glass case with UV-filtering glass. Never attempt to clean the bottle aggressively; gentle dusting with a soft cloth is sufficient. Avoid handling the bottle with bare hands if possible — oils from skin can leave residues that etch into antique glass over decades. If the bottle has an original paper label, keep it in a low-humidity environment to prevent adhesive deterioration.The 1916 Coca-Cola contour bottle sits at the exact intersection of mass production and accidental art. Earl Dean was not trying to make something beautiful. He was trying to make something recognizable. He succeeded so thoroughly that his shape outlived every contemporary who saw it emerge from the annealing lehr in Terre Haute, and it will likely outlive everyone reading this sentence. That is a strange kind of immortality — to be remembered not for who you were but for the curve of a glass hip, eight ribs on a lower body, and a patent date stamped into the base of a bottle that was never meant to be kept.
And yet here we are, keeping them.
