Stephen Bayley

The art of Coke

Stephen Bayley celebrates the 100th birthday of the Coca-Cola 'contour' bottle - the <span style="color: #333333;">most successful manufactured artefact ever</span>

issue 07 February 2015

In 1915 D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation was premièred, Henry Ford manufactured his millionth Model-T (‘a million of anything is a lot’, he said), Kafka’s Metamorphosis was published and so, too, was one of Einstein’s critical contributions to his own general theory of relativity.

Mixed into this modernist cocktail of extreme achievement and harrowing perceptions was something more banal, but just as enduring: the Coca-Cola ‘contour’ bottle.

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