Hutchinson bottle

In the beginning the syrup only was drawn from containers and served in glasses before in 1894 Coca-Cola was bottled the first time. The earliest bottles known to contain Coca-Cola were of the Hutchinson stoppered variety. Since 1899 the words Coca-Cola appeared in either block print or script lettering on the bottles and embossing usually designated the city where the bottle was originally filled. These Hutchinson bottles were used only briefly by fewer than a dozen bottling works till just after the turn of the century. Joseph Augustus Biedenharn from Vicksburg/Mississippi was the very first Coca-Cola bottler.

straight sided bottle or straight-up bottle

Crown-top, straight sided bottles replaced the heavier, cruder Hutchinson bottles in the early 1900`s. Literally millions of these crown-top bottles were used by the ever-increasing number of Coca-Cola franchises between 1900 and 1916. Few records were kept, however, and individualism was rampant.

A given Coca-Cola bottling works might use bottles of several different styles and colors at various times. Some bottles had fancy designs such as rings, shields or arrows embossed onto the glass; still other had slug plates identifying the then proprietor of the Coca-Cola franchise. All of these straight sided bottles had a paper label (like the one shown on the left) identifying the product they contained and bore the Coca-Cola trademark embossed in script lettering as well. The early crown-top bottles were hand blown in molds with their necks and lips finished off by special hand-held tools. Such techniques often left rough seams, irregular patterns of thick and thin glass, numerous bubbles and imperfections in the glass itself, and sometimes crooked shapes. Machine-made crown-top bottles with fewer deficiencies and evenly formed seams began to replace the hand-tooled bottles after 1910. The variety of glass colors used ranged from clear and aqua to differing shades of blue, green and amber. Even the amount of liquid a bottle contained varied considerably since 6, 6 1/2, 7 up to quart-size 24 and 26 ounce bottles existed. The script writing Coca-Cola trademark appeared sometimes at the base of the bottle, sometimes in the center, sometimes up on the shoulder.

Hobbleskirt bottle One of the most famous and well known packages in the world. Different stories climb around its creation. One of them tells us that the Coca-Cola Company invited entries for a competition to develop a bottle that is recognized in the dark and if it is broken.

Another story says that Coca-Cola's familiar hobbleskirt bottle was born out of confusion in the summer of 1913. During a heat wave that forced the Root Glass Company to close for a brief period, Alex Samuelson, a plant manager, decided to try to come up with a distinctive bottle for Coca-Cola based on its formula. Nevertheless fact is that Samuelson ended up with a picture of a cacao bean (the source of chocolate) rather than the cola nut or coca leaf, and used it as the basis for his design. The "prototype"-bottle Samuelson designed, todays so called "root-bottle", had a much more exaggerated hobbleskirt shape and was never put into production. This bottle did not fit to the bottling machines so that after some changings the bottle became the standard in 1915. Therefore the first patent for these bottles was issued on Nov. 16, 1915 to this Chapman Root Glass Company of Terre Haute, Indiana. This patent was renewed on Dec. 25, 1923. Additionally I have got the information by Jeff Dean, that his grandfather Earl R. Dean was the designer of the original Coca-Cola contour bottle. Samuelson only was the plant superviser and is registered on the patent. More information find on his homepage!

The nickname "hobbleskirt" was created sometimes later when people thought that the contour of the bottle would look like the "skirts" of the Gibson Girls, which were very often seen on many paintings of the american illustrator Charles Dana Gibson in those days. In 1957 The Coca-Cola Company, USA decided to eliminate the traditional embossing of its trademark on the bottle and replace it with Coca-Cola in white Applied Color Labeling (ACL). In 1960 the hobbleskirt bottle was registered as a trademark becoming only second package to be registered as a trademark in the US. In 1961 as the ACL process became more sophisticated a two color, full wrap ACL label was developed. The white Coca-Cola trademark on a red background gave the bottle a very colorful appeal. This two-color version was used predominately in the international markets.