Quick! Name at least one commercial product that you would know anywhere, just by a silhouette of its shape? Chances are, you said the Coca-Cola bottle.

One of the most popular if not "the" favorite soft drinks in the world, Coke began life in the early 1880s as a mixture strictly meant for soda fountains, where it sold for five cents a glass. Eventually it would be bottled for individual use, and taking home from the store, but the packaging was...well, rather blah.

That's what caused a bottler to suggest to Coke that if they created something distinct, a shape so unique people would recognize it in the dark, just by feel, it would seal the drink's place as the leading soft drink of the day. And so it happened that in 1915, Alexander Samuelson and Earl Dean of the Root Glass Company came up with what was referred to as the "hobble skirt" design, mimicking the line of women's skirts, but providing a distinctive shape and grip like no other bottle on the market. But one of the chief features was not grounded in fashion, it came from the cocoa bean.

The deep grooves, which set the Coke bottle apart from competitors', were copied from an illustration in the Encyclopedia Britannica for 1913. The end product was bottle manufactured with Georgia green glass (so named for the company's home state), and a raised glass text showing the name.