Coca-Cola's iconic bottle was designed by mistake — a cocoa pod looked like a coca leaf

In 1915, Coca-Cola launched a contest for bottlers to design a bottle that could be recognized even in the dark, and even when broken. The Root Glass Company of Terre Haute, Indiana, took the challenge. Company president Chapman J. Root and bottle designer Earl R. Dean decided to base the design on one of the soda's two botanical ingredients: the coca leaf or the kola nut.

There was one problem: nobody at Root Glass knew what a coca leaf or a kola nut actually looked like. Dean and a colleague went to the local library but could not find any information about either plant. Instead, Dean found an illustration of a cocoa pod in the Encyclopædia Britannica — the seed pod of the cacao tree, which shares no botanical relationship with the coca plant or the kola nut. The cocoa pod had a distinctive ridged, gourd-like shape. Dean sketched it, added a flare at the bottom, and submitted the design.

The Coca-Cola Company chose the Root Glass design over other entries at the 1916 bottler's convention. The contour bottle was on the market by 1916 and became the standard Coca-Cola bottle by 1920. The bottle was issued a design patent on November 16, 1915, and a revised version was patented on December 25, 1923.

The contour bottle became one of the most recognized package designs in the world. In 1977, it was registered as a trademark — one of the first packages to receive trademark protection. The bottle is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. A shape designed by accident, based on the wrong plant, became a symbol of American consumer culture.