Coca-Cola contour bottle

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Patented form (1915)

The Coca-Cola contour bottle , also Humpelrock bottle (English, hobbleskirt bottle ) or, after the actress of the same name, Mae West , is the result of a competition announced by the Coca-Cola Company in 1915. The contour bottle is an internationally registered trademark of the Coca-Cola Company with a high recognition value . Coca-Cola is also the owner of the three-dimensional European community brand “Contour Bottle”.

history

Prototype of the contour bottle

The basic shape of today's contour bottle was designed in 1915 by T. Clyde Edwards, Earn Dean, and Alexander Samuelson (a Swedish immigrant from Terre Haute , Indiana ) of the Root Glass Company and selected from the other designs submitted by the jury . The fact that Earn Dean was instrumental in the development of the contour bottle is well documented. After the Coca-Cola Company placed the order with Root Glass Co., its owner Chapman J. Root called a meeting with its key employees, including operations manager Alexander Samuelson and designer, machinist and engraver Earl R. Dean were to discuss the implementation of the contract.

Modern contour Coca-Cola bottle. The belly of the bottle is noticeably slimmer than in the original design.

Dean then drew the first draft and presented it to Root. The area for the Coca-Cola label was not yet drawn on this draft. In the design, the designers oriented according to some sources on the shape of the leaf of the coca bush , write other sources which form the shape of a Tiffany vase to. However, the company's English website writes that the idea for the design came to the inventors while looking at a picture of a cocoa bean . The final approval was incumbent on the owner of the manufactory, after whose consent Dean made a mold, with which numerous prototypes were initially produced. The aim was to design packaging that clearly differentiated the Coca-Cola product from copycat products and that could be recognized immediately, even in the dark, simply by touching it. Another reason for the chosen shape was that at that time drinks were mainly cooled with ice. Transparent glass bottles with clear, straight lines were no longer clearly visible in the ice water, and the labels peeled off in the water. Patenting followed the development ; Samuelson signed the necessary applications. The contour bottle was registered under the name "Design for a Bottle or Similar Article" with the patent number 46.180 on November 16, 1915 and protected for 14 years. In the patent application, Samuelson wrote that his design was "a new, original, and ornamental design for bottles or similar articles." It is noteworthy that at the time of patenting in 1915 by Alexander Samuelson, packaging was only received by the United States Patent and Trademark Office in exceptional cases registered as trademarks .

Coca-Cola advertisement from 1922

In the patented form, however, the design was never used, as the bottle was unstable due to the large waist circumference. A revision was necessary to give the bottle greater stability; it is believed that Dean made the modifications himself. In coordination with the client, the light green color “German Green” was chosen as the color for the bottles, which was later renamed “Georgia Green”; However, color deviations occurred regularly in the first years of production. According to some documents, the production of the contour bottles began in 1916. Since the patent was held by the Root Glass Co., the production of the bottles continued mainly there; in other cases, Root received a royalty of 5 cents per 144 bottles. The assumption that Coca-Cola had the power to decide on the production of the bottles is untenable. The Coca-Cola contour bottle weighed 14.5 ounces and could hold 6.5 ounces of the finished product.

Competition among manufacturers

Different Coca-Cola bottle designs

In the early years, the Graham family owned Southern Indiana Glass Works was involved in production and was allowed to engrave their own logo on the bottles; The other manufacturers followed this example later and engraved their identifying features in the (then still) unlabeled bottle bottom. This circumstance is due to the fact that the Root Glass Co. was already working for other lemonade manufacturers and their capacities were insufficient for the order from Coca-Cola, and it also made it possible to precisely allocate the empties. Southern Indiana Glass Works was founded in 1905 and specialized in machine glass manufacture.

The number of glass factories involved in the production of the contour bottles was continuously increased, with Coca-Cola informing each company in writing about the desired physical characteristics of the bottles. In 1922, Root applied for another patent for an improved bottle design, which was granted to him for another 14 years. Other patents followed later. In 1956 another optical change was made to the bottle: In that year Coca-Cola began to screen- print its logo in white on the bottles. In 1960, the contour bottle was permanently registered as a trademark of the Coca-Cola Company. It was not until a few years after the 50th birthday of the contour bottle that the Coca-Cola Company commissioned Owens-Illinois Glass Co. to make a mold based on the original drawings, which were used to make 5,000 bottles with "1915-1965" engraved on the bottom .

In 2016, the General Court of the European Union (EGC) found that contour bottles without corrugation lacked a distinguishing feature and therefore should not be protected as a three-dimensional community trademark, as requested by the Coca-Cola Company.

Manufacturer

The following manufacturers produced contour bottles for the Coca-Cola Company. Name, seat and period are given:

  • Root Glass Co. Terre Haute , Indiana, 1917-1930
  • Graham Glass Co. Loogootee, Indiana 1917
  • Graham Glass Co., Evansville , Indiana, 1918-1927
  • Graham Glass Co., Okmulgee , Oklahoma, ca. 1920-1926
  • Graham Glass Co., Chacotah, Oklahoma 1921
  • Laurens Glass Works Laurens, SC, 1917-1928
  • Chattanooga Bottle & Glass Co. Chattanooga, TN 1917-1927
  • Obear-Nester Glass Co. East St. Louis, MO circa 1918 - circa 1919
  • Lynchburg Glass Co. Lynchburg, Virginia, 1919-1920
  • Southern Glass Co., Vernon (LA), CA 1919- circa 1926
  • FE Reed & Co. Rochester, New York 1920-1927
  • Illinois-Pacific Glass Corp., Los Angeles, CA ca. 1926-1929

development

Stages of development

Today, the contour bottle no longer exists in its original form, but has been continuously developed over the years, which has not only aesthetic, but also practical reasons, as, for example, the slimmer shape of the bottles made it easier to transport the bottles in the filling systems. The packaging units also changed (the bottles were tied into six- pack carriers ), and the bottle design itself was modified. In the 1950s, the size of the bottle was adjusted to meet growing demand and a king-size contour bottle was released. In the 1960s, Coca-Cola was sold in non-returnable bottles , and later, in the last decade of the 20th century, it was switched to plastic bottles. In 1982, the group began to fill product variations such as Coca-Cola Light in contour bottles.

More designs

Fanta ring bottle
Fanta bottle in the classic ring design with glass

Fanta Classic is bottled in so-called "ring bottles", the design of which is based on the bottles designed by Raymond Loewy for Fanta in 1955 . Loewy had previously worked as a designer for Coca-Cola and created, among other things, refrigerators and dispensing systems for the company. To better protect the drink from sunlight, it was decided to use a brown shade. In 2004 the classic Fanta bottle was replaced by the so-called "Splash Bottle".

Contour glasses
Coca-Cola glass as it was available from McDonalds as part of limited promotions

In August 2007, the Coca-Cola Company announced a cooperation with McDonald’s , according to which every customer of the fast food chain received a Coca-Cola glass with a maxi menu. In 2012, Coca Cola released “retro glasses”, which were also given out to McDonald's customers. The series comprised seven glasses based on samples from the years 1899, 1900, 1916, 1955, 1961, 1994 and 2012, and another collector's glass was issued at the start of the Summer Olympics . The campaign was advertised on radio and television.

Litigation with Pepsi

In 2012, Coca-Cola failed in an attempt to prohibit Pepsi from filling its product in the so-called Carolina bottle , which was justified by the similarity of the bottle design to the contour bottle. However, the district court in Hamburg contradicted this and decided the legal dispute in 2012 in favor of Pepsi. The court ruled that the similarity was not so great that it would jeopardize Coca-Cola's trademark rights. The Carolina bottle was introduced in 2009 as a 0.2 liter bottle and expanded to include a 0.33 liter bottle the following year. Pepsi Co. also released a specially designed Pepsi designer gastro glass for the market launch, which was specially developed for the catering industry.

Artist's impression

In the artistic representation of the contour bottle, the advertising graphics paid for by the Coca-Cola Company and the use of the bottle by independent artists, for example in Pop Art, can be distinguished.

Artistic contour bottle advertising

In the comics about Lucky Luke - beginning in the 1950s - there is the anachronism that the cowboy (also together with his horse) regularly drinks cola from a contour bottle. However, his first adventure is dated to 1880, decades before this bottle shape was introduced. Gil Formosa, who drew Lucky Luke , also worked as a commercial artist and implemented the cartoon character's preference for the soft drink in the contour bottle in an effective advertising manner.

On the occasion of the 75th anniversary, Coca-Cola launched so-called sleeve bottles in 2004. These were covered with a wafer-thin layer of glass and contained historical motifs. In 2007 Coca-Cola presented aluminum cans in the shape of the contour bottles, initially as the "X-Mas Bottle" and the following year on the occasion of the European Football Championship in 2008 also as a football edition. As early as 2005, aluminum cans developed by the artist group Magnificent Five (M5) were released as works of art. For this they received the golden award for the best aluminum bottle in 2005 from CanMaker Magazine .

Coca Cola Light black and white art of the Lord Jim Lodge

The artist community Lord Jim Loge brought out a black and white edition of artistically designed Coca-Cola light bottles in 2006, which won them the “Coke Light Art Edition” competition.

For the 80th anniversary in 2009, the bottles were provided with labels designed by the company's employees themselves. The company also purchases works of art related to its history itself; It already owns three of six works of art by the American artist Norman Rockwell and started a campaign in 2012 to buy up the three advertising posters designed by the artist that were still missing. The Coke Bottle design , which is based on the shape of the model, is named after the contour bottle .

In 2015, the marketing and advertising agency Memac Ogilvy & Mather from Dubai designed a work of art and later handed it over to representatives of the Coca-Cola group. It is a kind of matryoshka bottle, which is hand-made and mouth-blown. They should reflect the development stages of the contour bottle.

Star photographer David LaChapelle photographed British actress Rita Ora and Avicii in their “Coca-Cola Moments” for Coca-Cola's 100th birthday .

Painting, graphics, object art

Aside from advertising graphics, the Coca-Cola contour bottle has been depicted or used in various ways in the visual and performing arts since the 1940s . In most cases it is assigned a very specific symbolism.

1940s

Salvador Dalí and Gala lived in the United States from 1940 to 1948. In California in 1943, he created the surrealist painting The Poetry of America (interpreting. The poetry of America ), in which he Coca-Cola contour bottle used the artistic figure of a "subject of consumer society" in the United States. Dalí was the first painter to use the contour bottle, a consumer item in everyday life, not for advertising purposes, but symbolically and artistically.

Eduardo Paolozzi , who anticipated elements of Pop Art as early as 1947, showed in his collage I Was a Rich Man's Plaything (1947), consisting of newspaper pages and advertising (1947), a contour bottle, which pars pro toto for the “quintessence of American capitalism in the form of coca -Cola Company ”and its global expansion (“ Coca-Colonialism ”).

1950s

A premiere - the depiction of the contour bottle on the cover of a nationally distributed journal - was delivered by Time Magazine in 1950 with the imprint of an image that shows a personalized Coca-Cola logo that "soaks" an equally personified globe with a bottle of Coca-Cola .

In 1958, the object artist Robert Rauschenberg used three empty contour bottles, an “evocation of materialist capitalism” in commodity culture , in his collage consisting of objects and drawings .

1960s

In 1961, the German artist Wolf Vostell produced the Coca-Cola décollage , in which he alienated the brand message and combined it with other underlying elements. It is now in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne .

A decade and a half after Dalí, Pop Art artists discovered the Coca-Cola contour bottle as an art object. Andy Warhol created the 180 centimeter high painting Coca-Cola in 1962, which shows a contour bottle painted in black on a white background; the Coca-Cola lettering next to it is not completely executed. For Warhol, the painting was the breakthrough and he himself saw it as "the beginning of Pop Art in America".

Warhol created several of these paintings and Coca-Cola [4] Large Coca-Cola was auctioned at Sotheby’s on November 9, 2010 for $ 35,362,500. In the same year, Warhol's screen print Green Coca-Cola Bottles followed , showing 112 empty and partially filled contour bottles ; the work is now in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In addition, in 1962 Coca-Cola [3] (also 3 Coca-Cola Bottles ; casein paint on canvas), which was auctioned for 57.2 million dollars at Christie's in 2013, 5 Coca-Cola Bottles and 210 Coca-Cola 210 Bottles .

1970s

The Brazilian conceptual artist Cildo Meireles designed in 1970 for a thematic exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York two projects under the title Insertions into Ideological Circuits that "the circulation and exchange of goods, wealth and information as manifestations of a dominant ideology " at the " consumer behavior in capitalism ”. In one of these projects, The Coca-Cola Project , Meireles used Coca-Cola contour bottles and changed the text - adding critical political statements (“Yankees Go Home”) or instructions on how to use the bottle as a Molotov cocktail in one Mixture of Portuguese and English - before he put it back into the commercial cycle.

In 1975 Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) created a limited number of contour bottles filled with herbal tea and closed with a stopper in a wooden box under the title Bruno Cora-Tee .

Movie

In the comedy The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980), a Coca-Cola contour bottle carelessly thrown from an airplane is considered a gift from the gods by the San living in the Kalahari and causes so much quarrel, envy and discord that the hunter Xi decides to bring back their unwanted gift to the gods and to throw the bottle from a cliff into an abyss at the “end of the world”.

In this film, the contour bottle stands for the encroachment of modern commerce, which invades a virginal environment, brings about changes and triggers the described behaviors of resentment, against which Xi tries to resist.

Exhibitions

Contour bottle at the entrance of the World of Coca-Cola Building in Las Vegas

The Coca-Cola contour bottle was the subject of exhibitions for certain occasions, and there are also numerous museums in the USA:

This exhibition was criticized by the leading Finnish art critic Otso Kantokorpi as a marketing vehicle for a global brand, as the museum is financed by tax money. Kantokorpi collected 200 signatures against the exhibition and threatened a lifelong boycott against the museum. The namesake Sinebrychoff is a Finnish brewery and a soft drink company that also has the Finnish license for Coca-Cola.

There are also two corporate museums operated by The Coca-Cola Company:

literature

  • Manfred Bruhn: Brand Management Manual. Compendium for successful brand management. Strategies - instruments - experiences. Springer-Verlag, 2013, ISBN 978-3-663-01557-4 , pp. 1238/39.
  • Andrea Exler: Coca-Cola. From home-brewed stimulants to American icons. Europ. Verl.-Anst., Hamburg 2006, ISBN 978-3-434-46810-3 , p. 34.
  • Norman L. Dean: The Man behind the Bottle: The Origin and History of the Classic Contour Coca-Cola Bottle as told by the Son of it's Creator. Xlibris, 2010.
  • Cecil Munsey: The Illustrated Guide to the Collectibles of Coca-Cola. Hawthorn Books, New York 1972.

Web links

Commons : Coca-Cola bottles  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Monika Kaßmann: Basics of packaging: Guidelines for interdisciplinary packaging training , Beuth-Verlag, 2014, p. 277
  2. Coca-Cola website ( Memento of the original from May 20, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF), see p. 3 (accessed on May 20, 2016) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / assets.coca-colacompany.com
  3. ^ Jon Attwood: Graphic products (=  GCSE design and technology for Edexcel ). Heinemann Educational, Oxford 2002, ISBN 0-435-41780-0 , p. 28 ( books.google.com ).
  4. a b c d e f Society of Historical Archeology website (accessed May 22, 2016)
  5. see the Hamburg Justice website (press release) ( Memento of the original from May 30, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Accessed May 30, 2016) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / justiz.hamburg.de
  6. Official Coca-Cola website (accessed May 22, 2016)
  7. Historical Society Museum (accessed July 27, 2016)
  8. Coca-Cola Company website (accessed June 5, 2016)
  9. Legal Tribune online (accessed May 19, 2016)
  10. Rainer Gries: Product Communication - History and Theory , Facultas Verlags- und Buchhandels AG: 2008, p. 11
  11. Official product website of the Coca-Cola Company (accessed on May 20, 2016)
  12. History of the designer on the official website of the Coca-Cola Company (accessed May 20, 2016)
  13. Loewy was also the designer of the logo for the Lucky Strike cigarette brand , the Greyhound bus Scenicruiser and the Shell shell .
  14. Article in the Badische Zeitung (accessed on May 22, 2016)
  15. ^ Website of Coca Cola Germany. Retrieved May 22, 2016 .
  16. ^ Website of the "Horizont" magazine. Retrieved May 22, 2016 .
  17. Press release by the Hamburg Justice Department ( memento of the original from May 30, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed on May 30, 2016)  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / justiz.hamburg.de
  18. Official website of the Pepsi Co. ( Memento of the original from May 31, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed on May 31, 2016)  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.pepsico.de
  19. Anachronisme (including a picture of an early Coca-Cola bottle) on goscinny.free.fr
  20. Gil Formosa: Coca-Cola advertisement with Lucky Luke
  21. ^ Website of the Coca-Cola Company (German). Retrieved May 22, 2016 .
  22. Report in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (accessed on May 19, 2016)
  23. ^ Website of the artist. Retrieved May 22, 2016 .
  24. Company website (accessed May 22, 2016)
  25. Article in the advertising week (accessed on May 19, 2016)
  26. website of drinksandmore.ch (Accessed on May 24, 2016)
  27. Stephen Bayley: The art of Coke , The Spectator, Feb. 7, 2015; accessed on June 21, 2016.
  28. The type of symbols is explained in the references to the individual examples.
  29. ^ David Schmalz: A world-class Salvador Dali art collection comes to Monterey , montereycountyweekly.com, February 25, 2016; Retrieved June 7, 2016.
  30. The cosmic athletes (link to picture) and detailed view
  31. Torsten Otte: Salvador Dalí. A biography with self-testimonies from the artist . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2006, ISBN 3-8260-3306-X , p. 84 ( books.google.com ).
  32. a b Barbara Groseclose, Jochen Wierich: Internationalizing the History of American Art: Views . Penn State Press, Pennsylvania 2009, ISBN 978-0-271-04689-1 , pp. 181 ( books.google.com ).
  33. Eduardo Paolozzi I Was a Rich Man's Plaything (1947)
  34. ^ Cover of Time Magazine on May 15, 1950.
  35. Mark Pendergrast: For God, Country, and Coca-Cola. The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It . Basic Books, 2013, ISBN 978-0-465-02917-4 , pp. 478 ( books.google.com ).
  36. Stephen Brown, Anthony Patterson: Imagining Marketing. Art, Aesthetics and the Avant-Garde . Routledge, London 2003, ISBN 0-415-23486-7 , pp. 1 ( books.google.com ).
  37. ^ Coca-Cola Plan, 1958 ; Retrieved June 7, 2016.
  38. ^ Wolf Vostell: Coca-Cola (1961) ; accessed on June 8, 2016.
  39. ^ Jeannette Neustadt: Economic Aesthetics and Brand Cult. Reflections on the brand phenomenon in contemporary art . transcript Verlag, 2014, ISBN 978-3-8394-1659-4 , pp. 144 ( books.google.com ).
  40. a b Christies: Andy Warhol Coca-Cola [3]
  41. ^ Contemporary Art - Sotheby's, New York (auction on November 9, 2010) .
  42. ^ Jeannette Neustadt: Economic Aesthetics and Brand Cult. Reflections on the brand phenomenon in contemporary art . transcript Verlag, 2014, ISBN 978-3-8394-1659-4 , pp. 247 ( books.google.com ).
  43. ^ Whitney Museum of American Art: Andy Warhol: Green Coca-Cola Bottles. collection.whitney.org, accessed January 26, 2018 .
  44. Ann Binlot: Andy Warhol's Coca-Cola Art Highlighted In Exhibition Commemorating The Bottle's 100th Anniversary , Forbes Online, March 25th. 2015, accessed June 15, 2016.
  45. Andy Warhol 3 Coca-Cola Bottles
  46. Chris Boyette: Warhol painting sold for $ 105.4 million , CNN Online, November 26, 2013, accessed June 15, 2016.
  47. Adbranch.com: Andy Warhol's Coca-Cola Paintings
  48. Elizabeth Manchester: Cildo Meireles - Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project 1970 , Tate, September 2006; accessed on June 21, 2016.
  49. ^ Cildo Meireles: The Coca-Cola Project (three bottles as an example); accessed on June 21, 2016.
  50. ^ Joseph Beuys: Bruno Corà Tea , accessed on June 24, 2016.
  51. Scott Jordan Harris: Rosebud Sleds and Horses' Heads: 50 of Film's Most Evocative Objects - An Illustrated Journey . Intellect Books, Bristol 2013, ISBN 978-1-78320-040-5 , pp. 71 ( books.google.com ).
  52. Jonathan Glancey: The Real Thing: The Coke Bottle at 100 , BBC Culture Online, May 15, 2015; accessed on May 24, 2016.
  53. Press release of the museum on the exhibition Coca-Cola-Pullo - 100 Vuotta ; accessed on May 24, 2016.
  54. ^ Sarah Cascone: Finnish Art Critics Protest Branded Coca-Cola Exhibition , artnet news, September 9, 2015; accessed on May 24, 2016.
  55. official website (accessed May 24, 2016)