Library of Congress collection from the Patent Office reveals a colorful, burgeoning era of consumer culture
The slow, competitive fizz began building when Coca-Cola and then Pepsi were introduced in the last 15 years of the 1800s.
Pepsi made headway with its nickel bottles in the 1920s, but by 1950 Coke had 47 percent of the carbonated soft drink market to Pepsi’s 10 percent. Pepsi hired a former Coke employee as its CEO, and the competition exploded like a shaken soda can: Pepsi was deemed the best soda by U.S. consumers in the 1975 Pepsi Challenge, only to see Coke rebound in the 1980s as the dominant brand and retains that distinction today.
The two soft drink behemoths exemplify the early years of what historians call the “mass consumer culture,” displayed via a beautiful collection of commercial labels and advertisements at the Library of Congress that came from the then-United States Patent Office.
The USPTO used to register copyrights for commercial materials such as labels and ads from around 1870 to 1940. In addition, labels and advertisements were submitted as specimens with trademark applications to demonstrate that owners were using the trademarks in commerce. Adam Bisno, the USPTO’s official historian, explained their appeal as pop culture artifacts and historical significance:
“In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mass production and the proliferation of media created new modes of shopping and spending. As prices came down and productivity increased, the consumption of goods and services beyond what was absolutely necessary became a pastime of the majority of Americans.
“The result was a consumer society built on intricate distinctions among brands (such as Coke and Pepsi) as firms vied for the attention and spending money of the masses.”
Copyright protections coupled with trademark registrations from the Patent Office were one way for firms to protect the creative strategies they devised to capture the gaze and cultivate the trust of increasingly discerning consumers.
In the early 20th century, still more iconic companies got their footing among American consumers. The Big 3 car companies got their start in 1903 (Ford), 1908 (General Motors), and 1925 (Chrysler). In the same era, food staples like Kellogg’s, Pillsbury, and Heinz hit the shelves.
“The collection at the Library of Congress reveals these firms’ advertising efforts in vivid detail,” Bisno notes. “It also reveals the visual universe American consumers encountered in their everyday lives.
“Careful study of the collection will yield new knowledge about the continuities and discontinuities of consumer culture in an era of fast and broad transition. An exhibition of select artifacts from this collection would expose members of the public to the colorful and complex process by which our ancestors built the consumer society we now inhabit.”
