American Letter: Stepping off the Kenny trail for the fizz of Coca-Cola

In 1915 the Root Glass Company of Terre Haute, Indiana was one of eight glass manufacturers to take up the challenge set by a company based in Atlanta, Georgia: design a drinks bottle that could be recognised lying broken on the ground or by feeling it in the dark. The brief for the open competition was laid out on a single page.

The glass company's founder and president Chapman J Root charged his staff, led by Alexander Samuelson, the glass company's foreman, to develop a design. Seeking inspiration, T Clyde Edwards, the auditor, decided to go to the local Emeline Fairbanks Memorial Library and look up the words in the name of the prospective client in a 1913 Encyclopedia Britannica.

He looked up "cocoa" and found a picture of a cocoa pod. He made a drawing and showed it to the mould shop supervisor Earl Dean. They passed a sketch on to Samuelson as an idea for the new bottle.

Their contoured bottle with parallel grooves and tapered ends resembles a cocoa pod with a spout at the top and base at the bottom. The company won the competition and Alexander Samuelson was listed on the November 16th, 1915 patent of the bottle as the inventor of the distinctive glass Coca-Cola bottle.

Centenary

Edwards mistakenly thought, given the name, that the drink was sourced from the cocoa plant. (The real ingredients of the formula first invented by Georgian pharmacist

John Pemberton

in 1886 remain a secret.) Despite the belief that the drink contained cocaine, years of legal actions in the early 20th century produced no evidence to show that the drink contained the drug.

"These bottles I have been buying up like crazy this year," Ted Ryan, Coca-Cola's archivist, told a group of Irish journalists, pointing to a shelf of antique Coca-Cola bottles and counterfeits produced by rivals trying to profit from the company's success. (Between 1888 and 1914 Coca-Cola sued more than 1,200 competitors.)

This year the iconic bottle celebrates its centenary which explains Ryan's buying spree. The archivist of a multi-billion dollar company, he buys Coca-Cola collector items online through his wife's eBay account so the unsuspecting vendor doesn't know the deep-pocketed buyer.

Ryan showed us around the dungeon-like archives in the basement of Coca-Cola's Atlanta-based world headquarters like a Willy Wonka with group of wide-eyed schoolchildren. While we played downstairs, upstairs the grown-ups talked. Taoiseach Enda Kenny, in Atlanta on his annual St Patrick's Day visit to the US, met the most senior executives at one of the world's top companies, a major employer in Ireland with 800 staff in Ballina, Wexford, Athy and Drogheda.

For a company that has been so successful, the biggest successes have, much like the bottle, come about by mistake or happenstance.

Handwritten logo

The red of Coca-Cola came from the colour of the barrels that the company used to differentiate the famous syrup from alcohol if a Revenue agent came calling for an inspection.

Red became the company's main advertising colour in 1969.

The name Coca-Cola and the famed handwritten logo were the brainchild of the company's accountant Frank Robinson. The Spencerian script was a popular font used by bookkeepers at that time and Robinson thought the two Cs would look well in advertising.

“The crazy thing is if you think about the fortune of Coca-Cola – an accountant writing the name in an accountant’s handwriting and then a mistake looking up the wrong thing in an encyclopedia – gave us our two best-known icons,” said Ryan.

Coke's cavernous archive is a treasure trove of trinkets and paraphernalia, from a decades-old stick of chewing gum, now worth $10,000, to four Norman Rockwell masterpieces painted for Coca-Cola calendars, each worth tens of millions of dollars.

Also down here are paintings that created the modern image of Santa Claus as the jovial, white-bearded man in a red suit. Artist Haddon Sundblom leaned on his family roots in Sweden – where Santa always wore red in the images of him – when meeting annual commissions for paintings from Coca-Cola between 1931 and 1964. Samuelson, inventor of the Coke bottle, was also of Swedish descent.

Coca-Cola profited from another, more recent mistake. When Coca-Cola introduced a new flavour called New Coke in 1985, the company used the public backlash to its advantage by returning to the original formula under a new guise called Coca-Cola Classic and playing up the public’s love of traditional drink. Sales soared.

Don Keough, the Irish-American who died last month at the age of 88, was the executive who led that operation. He famously said when the cynics wondered whether the company had planned it all as a marketing ploy: "We are not that dumb and we are not that smart."

There is certainly nothing dumb about Coca-Cola’s decision to maintain such a vast archive that serves as a masterclass in marketing.