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Coca-Cola was part of the American landscape. In the 1890s and early twentieth century, Asa Candler gave away millions of clocks, paper napkins, thermometers, lighters, watches, watch fobs, pocket knives, pocket books, bottle openers, sterling-silver perfume dispensers, serving trays, change trays, bookmarks, marble paperweights, and Japanese fans—all inscribed prominently with the trademark “Coca-Cola.”
Robert W. Woodruff, the gruff, autocratic Georgian whose family and associates took control of Coke’s ownership and management in 1919, drove himself and those around him toward a single goal—to make
Coke, as one of his lieutenants put it, “the most American thing in America.”
There was no popular vision of Santa as a round, ruddy fellow in a red suit with fleecy white piping until Sundblom invented it in a series of Christmas ads for Coke.
Ads never showed what was in Coca-Cola, but instead what Coca-Cola was in: pleasant, poignant scenes of everyday life.
During World War II, Woodruff decreed that Coke would be available for a nickel to members of the armed forces wherever they served.
Thanks to the war, Coca-Cola was considered one of the things that defined America.
In fact, for all its past glories, the Coca-Cola Company of 1950 was in a state of near paralysis.
By midday on Wednesday, March 1, 1950, Coca-Cola was the hottest story in the United States.
The company remained anxious for the Ministry of Agriculture to adopt a new, modern health law permitting a small amount of phosphoric acid in soft drinks.
New Coke made its ill-fated debut.
Coke has always been greater than the sum of its parts, from the very beginning.
in fact they were really getting their lift from sugar and caffeine—four times the amount of caffeine Coke contains today.
There were more than a dozen alterations to Coca-Cola’s sanctified secret formula, many of them significant, in the ninety-nine years leading up to the introduction of New Coke.
The idea of Coca-Cola was something quite separate and apart from the product.
In fact, that was Coke’s real secret formula: the inexplicable act of alchemy that elevated a bottle of sugar and water into a national icon.
The American public simply refused to accept the notion of a change in Coke, even if the change was an improvement.
Eleven weeks after the grand unveiling, the management brought back Coke Classic, and a grateful public rewarded the company with a surge in sales that lasted well into the 1990s.
It took two men to invent Coca-Cola, and they could hardly have been more different.
John Stith Pemberton
“Doc” Pemberton was a pharmacist who liked to dabble with patent medicines.
But it wasn’t Coca-Cola until it had a name, and it got that from another man. Frank Mason Robinson was a Yankee and a veteran of the Union Army.
naming the new syrup after two of its ingredients, the coca leaf and the kola nut.
Legend credits Pemberton with being the father of Coca-Cola, but Robinson was the father of the idea of Coca-Cola, and it was Robinson who kept the venture going through the early years when it very nearly died.
Pemberton ran a succession of retail and wholesale drug outlets and formed more than a dozen partnerships and corporations with investors who pumped thousands of dollars into his new sideline of proprietary medicines.
gave “a sense of increased intelligence and a feeling as though the body was possessed of a new power formerly unknown to the individual.…” Cocaine.
Pemberton did make one slight adjustment, however, by adding in a pinch of another popular new drug, extract of the African kola nut.
By 1886, Atlanta had five soda fountains operating during the summer months, and the principals of Pemberton Chemical wanted a beverage they could sell by the glass.
But there was no such thing as a “cola” soft drink.
Commercially, kola burst upon the scene in 1881, thanks to a prominent London druggist
named Thomas Christy, who mailed samples to drug houses across Europe and in the United States trying to drum up business.
the kola nut’s active ingredient turned out to be caffeine. Unlike cocaine, which proved to be quite a potent drug indeed, kola had no greater curative powers than a cup of tea.
create a soft drink with extract of kola as its base—a soft drink that could, in theory, compete with tea and coffee.
Pemberton gave up on kola extract and began working on a different approach.
he tried cutting the amount of kola extract in the syrup to a tiny drop and substituting synthetic caffeine in its place. “Pure” caffeine, in the form of a dry, white powder, came from several natural sources—tea, coffee, kola, and cocoa,
Pemberton discovered that he could mask the taste of the caffeine with sugar and other ingredients, and he began refining a recipe that would please—or at least not assault—the nostrils.
Next, he added caramel for coloring, giving the syrup its dark, distinctive, port-wine color.
he added lime juice, citric acid, and phosphoric acid.
vanilla extract, elixir of orange, and several pungent oils refined from various fruits, herbs, and trees: lemon, nutmeg, spicebush, coriander, and neroli, the last an ingredient in perfumes distilled from the flower of the orange tree.
The most exotic component was oil of cassia, also known as Chinese cinnamon, made from the bark of a tree found in the tropical regions of Asia.
Pemberton added to this brew the fluid extract...
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soft drink syrup is impossible to calculate more than a century later, but even a touch of the drug, in combination with the sugar and caffeine—four times the amount in today’s Coke, or about the same as a strong cup of coff...
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Coca-Cola. Delicious! Refreshing! Exhilarating! Invigorating!
It was the first Coca-Cola ad.
Robinson stayed. He believed Coca-Cola was a good product. It had an appealing taste (although some said you had to try it a second time to appreciate it fully).
In the spring of 1887, Robinson helped bring Coca-Cola back to life by passing out “sampling” tickets around Atlanta.
On June 6, 1887, in the midst of this mild boom, Doc Pemberton applied to the U.S. Patent Office to register the label of “Coca-Cola Syrup & Extract.”
Venable would be his working partner, and together they would own two-thirds of the rights to Coca-Cola. In exchange, Lowndes would give Pemberton an interest-free $1,200 loan.
John S. Candler, and introduced him to Robinson. As the three men stood talking on the street corner in the hot sun, Robinson spilled out his story and urged Candler to take the case.
But Candler did perform one favor for the little man. He brought Robinson’s plight to the attention of his brother, Asa.
