Why a Prototype Coca-Cola Bottle Sold for $108,000
The first design for Coke's famous bottle was a little too wide for bottlers' machines. A prototype of the slimmed-down version, the shape everyone knows, sold for $108,000.
The short version
In April 2019, Morphy Auctions sold a Root Glass Company prototype of the Coca-Cola contour bottle for $108,000, buyer's premium included. It is not the original 1915 design but the modified version, adjusted at the middle and base to suit bottlers' machinery, which became the familiar shape known today. Its value comes from being a rare, intact record of the moment the Coke bottle took its final form.
A prototype of the bottle you already know
On April 14, 2019, at a Coin-Op and Advertising sale in Las Vegas, Morphy Auctions sold lot 2285, a Coca-Cola Root Glass Co. modified prototype bottle. The final price was $108,000 including the buyer's premium, against an estimate of $100,000 to $150,000. The lot page records five bids. According to trade press reports, the buyer was an anonymous private collector.
The important word in that description is modified. This is not the original, slightly fatter 1915 design. It is the adjusted version, the one that became the Coke bottle people recognize today. Watch the short video on this page for the quick story; the longer one starts with a design brief.
A bottle you could recognize in the dark
In 1915, Coca-Cola asked glassmakers for a new bottle. According to the company's own history, it wanted a design so distinct that you would recognize it “by feel in the dark or lying broken on the ground.” The Root Glass Company of Terre Haute, Indiana, won the job.
The Root Glass team included C.J. and William Root, Alexander Samuelsson, Earl Dean and Clyde Edwards. Samuelsson, a Swedish immigrant who was the shop foreman, sent Dean and Edwards to the local library for ideas. According to a 1986 history in American Heritage, they found one under cocoa in the 1910 Encyclopaedia Britannica: an illustration of a cocoa pod, elongated and ribbed. Coca-Cola contains neither cocoa nor chocolate.
In the popular telling, the team was looking up the drink's namesake ingredients and landed on the wrong plant. Coca-Cola's own account is plainer, saying only that the team came across the cocoa illustration and had their shape. Either way, the design was patented on November 16, 1915.
Why the first design had to slim down
The 1915 shape did not go straight into production. Coca-Cola says the original patent showed a slightly fatter bottle than the one that was eventually made. In Dean's own account, as summarized in his Wikipedia biography, the prototype's middle was wider than its base, which he said would make it unstable on conveyor belts, so he equalized the middle and bottom diameters.
Morphy's catalog tells the same story from the bottlers' side. Coca-Cola accepted the new design at once, it says, but saw that the lower and middle diameters would have to change to make the bottle more practical and to fit the bottling machinery that bottlers were using. The modified version became the familiar design. According to the same catalog, the final design was introduced nationally in April 1917.
What made this prototype worth $108,000
The bottle's value rests on its place in that sequence. It is a physical record of the step between a patent drawing and the bottle that reached the public, made by the glass company that created the design.
Rarity and condition add to that. Trade press coverage of the sale quoted auctioneer Dan Morphy describing it as one of only two bottles of its type, and the only one known to have surfaced completely intact. Provenance helps, too: according to those reports, the bottle came from the collection of a former Coca-Cola employee who had also worked at Root Glass. And because the contour bottle is familiar far beyond the world of bottle collecting, the story of how it was made tends to attract a wider pool of interested buyers than most antique glass.
How it compares with the original prototype
The fatter, original prototype is a separate and pricier object. Morphy's catalog says there are two known examples of it, and that the second to surface sold at a Julien's auction in 2011 for $240,000, while Earl Dean's original pencil sketch of the design sold for $228,000 in the same sale.
One footnote on the 2019 price: some trade press, including Antique Trader, reported the result as $110,700 including premium. The auction house's own lot page lists $108,000, which is the figure used here.
The broader lesson is that a design's history can be priced in stages. The first idea, the working compromise and the finished product each attract their own collectors, and the scarcer the surviving stage, the higher it tends to go.
Questions people ask
Why is the Coca-Cola bottle shaped like that?
In 1915, Coca-Cola asked glassmakers for a bottle you could recognize by touch in the dark or even when broken. The Root Glass Company team based its ribbed design on an encyclopedia illustration of a cocoa pod, and the middle and base were later adjusted so the bottle would suit bottlers' machinery.
Was the $108,000 bottle the original 1915 prototype?
No. Morphy Auctions sold it as a modified prototype, the adjusted version that led to the familiar contour bottle. Morphy says one of the two known original prototypes sold at auction in 2011 for $240,000.
Does Coca-Cola contain cocoa?
No. As American Heritage noted in its 1986 history of the bottle, Coca-Cola contains neither cocoa nor chocolate, even though the bottle's shape came from an illustration of a cocoa pod.
Sources
- Coca-Cola Root Glass Co. Modified Prototype Bottle (Lot 2285)Morphy Auctions · 2019-04-14
- Prototype Coke bottle caps off $110,700Antique Trader · 2019-05-23
- The history of the Coca-Cola contour bottleThe Coca-Cola Company
- The BottleAmerican Heritage · 1986-06
- Earl R. DeanWikipedia · 2026-10-17
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