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.