by Tom Standage
The circumstances of nineteenth-century America provided the ideal environment for this new mass consumerism. It was a country where raw materials were abundant and skilled workers were always at a premium; but the new specialized machines allowed even unskilled workers to produce parts as good as those made by skilled machinists. The United States also mostly lacked the regional and class preferences of European countries; that meant a product could be mass-produced and sold everywhere, without the need to tailor it to local tastes. And the nation's railway and telegraph networks, which spread across the country after the end of the Civil War in 1865, made the whole country into a single market. Soon even the British were importing American industrial machinery, a sure sign that industrial leadership had passed from one country to the other. By 1900 the American economy had overtaken Britain's to become the largest on Earth. During the nineteenth century America focused its economic power inward; during the twentieth century the nation directed it outward to intervene decisively in two world wars. The United States then settled into a third, a cold war with the Soviet Union; the two sides were evenly matched in military terms, so the contest became one of economic power, and ultimately the Soviets could no longer afford to compete. By the end of the century, justly called the American century, the United States stood unchallenged as the world's only superpower, the dominant military and economic force in a world where different nations are interconnected more tightly than ever by trade and communications on a global scale.
The rise of America, and the globalization of war, politics, trade, and communications during the twentieth century, are mirrored by the rise of Coca-Cola, the world's most valuable and widely recognized brand, which is universally regarded as the embodiment of America and its values. For those who approve of the United States, that means economic and political freedom of choice, consumerism and democracy, the American dream; for those who disapprove, it stands for ruthless global capitalism, the hegemony of global corporations and brands, and the dilution of local cultures and values into homogenized and Americanized mediocrity. Just as the story of Britain's empire can be seen in a cup of tea, so the story of America's rise to global preeminence is paralleled in the story of Coca-Cola, that brown, sweet, and fizzy beverage.
Soda Water Bubbles Up
The direct ancestor of Coca-Cola and all other artificially carbonated soft drinks was produced, oddly enough, in a brewery in Leeds around 1767 by Joseph Priestley, an English clergyman and scientist. Priestley was first and foremost a clergyman, despite his unconventional religious views and a pronounced stutter, but he still found time to pursue scientific research. He lived next door to a brewery and became fascinated by the gas that bubbled from the fermentation vats, known simply at the time as "fixed air." Using the brewery as his laboratory, Priestley set about investigating the properties of this mysterious gas. He started by holding a candle just above the surface of the fermenting beer and noted that the layer of gas extinguished the flame. The smoke from the candle was then carried along by the gas, rendering it briefly visible, and revealing that it ran over the sides of the vat and fell to the floor. This meant the gas was heavier than air. And by pouring water quickly and roughly between two glasses held over a vat, Priestley could cause the gas to dissolve in the water, producing "exceedingly pleasant sparkling water." Today we know the gas as carbon dioxide, and the water as soda water.
One of the theories circulating about fixed air at the time was that it was an antiseptic, which suggested that a drink containing fixed air might be useful as a medicine. This would also explain the health-giving properties of natural mineral waters, which were often effervescent. Priestley presented his findings to the Royal Society in London in 1772 and published a book, titled Impregnating Water with Fixed Air, the same year. By this time he had devised a more efficient way to make his sparkling water, by generating the gas in one bottle from a chemical reaction and passing it into a second bottle, inverted and filled with water. Once enough gas had built up in the second bottle, he shook it to combine the gas with the water. For the medical potential of his work Priestley was awarded the Copley Medal, the Royal Society's highest honor. (Carbonated water was wrongly expected to be particularly useful at sea, for use against scurvy; this was before the effectiveness of lemon juice had become widely understood.)
Priestley himself made no attempt to commercialize his findings, and it seems that Thomas Henry, a chemist and apothecary who lived in Manchester, was the first to offer artificially carbonated water for sale as a medicine, sometime in the early 1770s. He followed the efforts to make artificial mineral waters very closely and was convinced of their health benefits, particularly in "putrid fevers, dysentery, bilious vomitings, etc." Using a machine of his own invention, Henry was able to produce up to twelve gallons of his sparkling water at a time. In a pamphlet published in 1781, he explained that it had to be "kept in bottles very closely corked and sealed." He also recommended taking it in conjunction with lemonade—a mixture of sugar, water, and lemon juice—so that he may have been the first to sell a sweet, artificially fizzy drink.
Joseph Priestley, who in 1772 published a book explaining how to make soda water.
During the 1790s scientists and entrepreneurs across Europe went into business making artificial mineral waters for sale to the public with varying degrees of success. Torbern Bergman, a Swedish scientist, encouraged one of his pupils to set up a small factory, but it was so inefficient that the woman employed to do the bottling had only three bottles an hour to seal. More successful was the venture established by a mechanic named Nicholas Paul in Geneva, in conjunction with Jacob Schweppe, a financier. Paul's method for carbonating the water was declared by physicians of Geneva in 1797 to surpass all others, and the firm was soon doing a thriving trade, even exporting its bottled water to other countries by 1800. Paul and Schweppe parted company and set up rival firms in Britain. Schweppe's firm produced more mildy carbonated water, which seems to have better suited British tastes; it was generally believed that water with fewer bubbles more closely imitated natural mineral water, and a cartoon from the period depicts drinkers of Paul's beverage as overinflated balloons.
Some of the new artificial mineral waters were prepared using sodium bicarbonate, or soda, so that soda water became the generic term for such drinks. They were strictly medical beverages until 1800; doctors prescribed them for various ailments, and they were considered a form of patent medicine by the British government, which imposed a duty of three pence on each bottle. One medical writer referred in 1798 to the "soda water" made and sold by Schweppe, and a London advertisement of 1802 states that "the gaseous alkaline water commonly called soda water has long been used in this country to a considerable effect."
However, soda water proved to be most popular in America. As in Europe, there was much scientific interest in the properties of natural mineral waters, and the possibilities of imitating them. The eminent Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush investigated the mineral waters of Pennsylvania and reported his findings to the American Philosophical Society in 1773. Two other statesman-scientists, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, also took an interest in the medicinal properties of mineral waters. The natural springs of Saratoga in upper New York State were particularly renowned at the time. George Washington visited them in 1783 and expressed sufficient interest that the following year a friend wrote to him to describe attempts to bottle the waters: "What distinguishes these waters . . . from all others . . . is the great quantity of fixed air they contain. . . . The water . . . cannot be confined so that the air will not, somehow or another, escape. Several persons told us that they had corked it tight in bottles, and that the bottles broke. We tried it with the only bottle we had, which did not break, but the air found its way through a wooden stopper and the wax with which it was sealed."
In the United States, soda water moved from scientific curiosity to commercial product with the help of Benjamin Silliman, the first professor of chemistry at Yale Unive
rsity. He went to Europe in 1805 to collect books and apparatus for his new department and was struck by the popularity of the bottled soda water being sold in London by Schweppe and Paul. On his return he began to make and bottle soda water for his friends and was immediately overwhelmed by demand. "Finding it quite impossible with my present means to oblige as many as call upon me for soda water, I have determined to undertake the manufacture of it on the large scale as it is done in London," he wrote to a business associate. He began selling bottled water in 1807 in New Haven, Connecticut.
Others soon followed in other cities, notably Joseph Hawkins in Philadelphia, who devised a new way to dispense soda water: through a fountain. Hawkins's aim was to imitate the spas and pump rooms built over natural springs in Europe, where the mineral water could be dispensed directly into glasses. According to a description of his spa-room from 1808, "The mineral water . . . is raised from the fountain or reservoir in which it is prepared under ground, through perpendicular wooden columns, which enclose metallick tubes, and by turning a cock at the top of the columns, the water may be drawn without the necessity of bottling." Hawkins was granted a patent for this invention in 1809. But the idea of selling soda water in spalike settings proved unpopular. Instead, apothecaries came to dominate the trade. By the late 1820s the soda fountain had become a standard feature of the apothecary's shop; the soda water was prepared and dispensed on the spot, rather than being sold in bottles (though bottled waters were imported from Europe, and Saratoga water was successfully bottled for sale starting in 1826).
Like so many other drinks before it, soda water started out as a specialist medicine and ended up in widespread use as a refreshment, with its medical origins granting it a comforting underlying respectability. As early as 1809 an American chemistry book noted that "soda water is also very refreshing, and to most persons a very grateful drink, especially after heat and fatigue." As well as being consumed on its own, it could be used to make sparkling lemonade, almost certainly the first modern fizzy drink. It was also being mixed with wine on both sides of the Atlantic by the early nineteenth century; one English observer noted that "when mixed with wine it is found that a much smaller quantity of wine satisfies the stomach and the palate, than wine does alone." Today we call this mixture a wine spritzer. But from the 1830s, and particularly in the United States, soda water was principally flavored using specially made syrups.
The American Journal of Health noted in 1830 that such syrups "are employed to flavor drinks and are much used as grateful additions to carbonic acid water." Syrups were originally handmade from mulberries, strawberries, raspberries, pineapples, or sarsaparilla. Special dispensers were added to soda fountains, which started to become increasingly elaborate. Blocks of ice were added to chill both the soda water and the syrups. By the 1870s the largest soda fountains were enormous contraptions. At the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, James Tufts, a soda-fountain magnate from Boston, displayed his Arctic Soda Water Apparatus. It was thirty feet high, towering over the spectators, and was adorned with marble, silver fittings, and potted plants. It was manned by immaculately dressed waiters and had to be housed in its own specially designed building. A testament to inventiveness and marketing prowess, this display generated plenty of orders for Tuft's American Soda Fountain Company.
The soda-water business was also becoming industrialized behind the scenes, thanks to businessmen such as John Matthews, a veteran of the British soda-water trade who moved to New York. Initially, he focused on making and selling his own soda water, and then on selling soda fountains, but when his son (also called John) joined the business, he expanded in a new direction. A prolific inventor, the younger Matthews devised specialized machinery to automate every aspect of the soda-water business, from carbonation to bottle washing, and he began selling this machinery to other firms. By 1877 the company had amassed over one hundred patents and had sold over twenty thousand machines. Its catalog offered "a complete establishment for making and bottling soda water, ginger ale, etc using corks" for the sum of $1,146.45. This included the apparatus and raw materials to generate the gas, two fountains to carbonate the water, a bottling machine, fifty gross of bottles, flavoring extracts, and colorings. Matthews's inventions were displayed at exhibitions and won awards around the world. They epitomized the American approach to mass production: Specialized machines handled each step of the process, the bottles and stoppers were standardized, interchangeable parts, and the resulting drink, produced cheaply in large quantities, had mass appeal.
Indeed, soda water, produced on an industrial scale and consumed by rich and poor alike, seemed to capture something of the spirit of America itself. Writing in Harper's Weekly in 1891, the author and social commentator Mary Gay Humphreys observed that "the crowning merit of soda-water, and that which fits it to be the national drink, is its democracy. The millionaire may drink champagne while the poor man drinks beer, but they both drink soda water." Her suggestion that soda water could claim to be America's national drink wras, however, only half right. A new national drink was indeed emerging at the time—but soda water was only the half of it.
Coca-Cola's Creation Myth
In May 1886 John Pemberton, a pharmacist who lived in Atlanta, Georgia, invented a drink. According to the Coca-Cola Company's official version of the story, he was a tinkerer who stumbled on the right combination of ingredients by accident, while trying to devise a cure for headaches. One afternoon he mixed various ingredients in a three-legged pot to create a caramel-colored liquid, which he then took to a nearby pharmacy, combining the liquid with soda water to create the sweet, fizzy, and invigorating drink—Coca-Cola—that would eventually reach nearly every corner of the world. The real story is rather more complicated, however.
Pemberton was, in fact, an experienced maker of patent medicines, the quack remedies that were hugely popular in America in the late nineteenth century. These pills, balsams, syrups, creams, and oils were generally triumphs of advertising over pharmacology. Some were harmless, but many contained large amounts of alcohol, caffeine, opium, or morphine. They were sold through newspaper advertisements, and their production became a huge industry after the Civil War, as veterans took to dosing themselves. The popularity of patent medicines reflected a general distrust of conventional medicines, which were often expensive and ineffective. Patent medicines offered an alluring alternative, marketed as they were on the basis of exotic ingredients or the medical knowledge of Native Americans, and under names with religious, patriotic, or mythological overtones: Munson's Paw-Paw Pills to Coax Your Liver into Action, Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills, and so on.
There was nothing to stop manufacturers of such medicines from making outrageous claims about their effectiveness. The Elixir of Life sold by a Dr. Kidd, for example, claimed to cure "every known ailment. . . . The lame have thrown away crutches and walked after two or three trials of the remedy. . . . Rheumatism, neuralgia, stomach, heart, liver, kidney, blood and skin diseases disappear as by magic." The newspapers that printed such advertisements did not ask any questions. They welcomed the advertising revenues, which enabled the newspaper industry to expand enormously; by the end of the nineteenth century patent medicines accounted for more newspaper advertising than any other product. The makers of St. Jacob's Oil, which was said to remedy "sore muscles," spent five hundred thousand dollars on advertising in 1881, and some advertisers were spending more than one million dollars a year by 1895.
The patent-medicine business was among the first to recognize the importance of trademarks and advertising, of slogans, logos, and hoardings. Since the remedies themselves usually cost very little to make, it made sense to spend money on marketing. With so many competing products on the market, however, only 2 percent of them made a profit, according to one estimate. But those that did succeed made fortunes for their inventors. One of the most famous was Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound. It was said to be "a positive cure for all those painful Complaints and Weaknesses so c
ommon to our best female population. . . . It removes faintness, flatulency, destroys all craving for stimulants, and relieves weakness of the stomach." Customers were encouraged to write to Pinkham for medical advice, even after her death in 1883, which was kept quiet. They received form letters in return, invariably recommending the use of more of her compound. When analyzed in the early twentieth century, it was found to contain 15 to 20 percent alcohol. Ironically, women temperance campaigners were among its most fervent users.
Pemberton's own attempts to make patent medicines had met with mixed success. At times his remedies produced a solid income, but during the 1870s he had a run of bad luck. He was declared bankrupt in 1872, and his attempts to get back on his feet were hampered by two fires that destroyed his stock. But he continued to develop new patent medicines in the hope that one of them would make him rich. Finally, in 1884, he started to get somewhere, thanks to the popularity of a new patent-medicine ingredient: coca.
The leaves of the coca plant had long been known among South American peoples for their stimulating effect; coca was known as "the divine plant of the Incas." Chewing a small ball of the leaves releases tiny quantities of an alkaloid drug, cocaine. In small doses this sharpens the mind, much like caffeine, and suppresses the appetite, making possible long treks across the Andes with very little food or sleep. Cocaine was isolated from coca leaves in 1855, and it then became the subject of much interest among Western scientists and doctors, who thought it might help to cure opium addicts by providing an alternative. (They were unaware that cocaine was just as addictive.) Pemberton followed the discussion of coca in the medical journals closely, and by the 1880s he and other patent-medicine makers were incorporating it into their tablets, elixirs, and ointments. Pemberton's contribution to this burgeoning field was a drink called French Wine Coca.