In truth, most patent medicines were little more than laxatives or emetics (to induce vomiting), often containing up to 50 percent alcohol. Consumers didn’t seem to care. By the turn of the twentieth century, they were big business, with anywhere between 20,000 and 50,000 different concoctions on offer and total sales of $80 million. For every fortune, however, a dozen vendors went bankrupt. The winners were those who created the best story, the coolest shaped container, or the catchiest advertisements to cement their names in consumers’ minds. Some relied on tales of exotic ingredients from Africa or the Far East. Others drew upon American Indian lore, pegging their origins, for example, to a secret formula given by an Indian chief to a trapper in exchange for rescuing his son from a bear.
No one exploited these gimmicks more relentlessly than a new breed of traveling salesmen who staged elaborate presentations known as “medicine shows.” A fixture of American life for nearly a century, these roving productions traveled the country in the hundreds during their height, from 1880 to 1900. After a “ballyhoo” of musical bandwagons, magicians, and comedians to warm up the crowd, salesmen reeled in buyers with their pitches, often whipping up fears of disease before magically “healing” a planted crowd member. One of the most notorious showmen, Clark Stanley, publicly killed hundreds of rattlesnakes to advertise his Snake Oil Liniment, which was eventually discovered to be little more than camphor and turpentine—forever making the term “snake-oil salesman” synonymous with fraud.
But most customers convinced themselves that the elixirs they bought from these traveling road shows actually worked. As one 1930s-era pitch doctor explained, the key was to hypnotize the buyer into thinking he’d come up with the idea to buy the product himself: “First, attention; second, interest; third, suggestion; fourth, imagination; fifth, desire; sixth, decision,” he explained. After years of shows, medicines such as Kickapoo Indian Sagwa and Hamlin’s Wizard Oil sold themselves, bringing crowds flocking whenever their wagons rolled into town. It was this kind of success that Civil War colonel and pharmacist John Pemberton was seeking when he moved to Atlanta from nearby Columbus, Georgia, in 1870. Pemberton was an early devotee of Samuel Thomson’s “every man his own doctor” philosophy, stirring local herbs and flowers into his own concoctions in a lab behind his pharmacy shop. He sold some, including Globe Flower Cough Syrup, marketed for consumption and bronchitis, and a “blood medicine” called Extract of Stillingia.
Yet Pemberton was no sleazy snake oil salesman. Wounded in one of the Civil War’s last battles, he was constantly plagued with pain himself, and took to self-dosing in an effort to find relief for the rest of his life. In fact, one tidbit that doesn’t make it into the official Coca-Cola myth is that he probably regularly dipped into his pharmacy cabinet for hits of morphine. Three of Pemberton’s colleagues in the drug trade later named him an addict. If that was true, the addiction likely led him to the substance that would seal his legacy: cocaine.
“I am convinced from actual experiments that [coca] is the very best substitute for opium, for a person addicted in the opium habit, that has ever been discovered,” he told The Atlanta Journal in 1885, adding that “the patient who will use it as a means of cure may deliver himself from the pernicious habit without inconvenience or pain.” He wasn’t alone in thinking so. Years before cocaine was found to be addictive, the little leaf from Peru was celebrated as a miracle drug. One Albany, New York, manufacturer marketed Cocaine Toothache Drops, picturing two contented children on a package trumpeting an “Instantaneous Cure!” (Indeed.)
But the most popular coca-laced “medicine” was a concoction called Vin Mariani, created by Parisian chemist Angelo Mariani by mixing red Bordeaux with a half a grain of cocaine. He cheerfully recommended three glasses a day for whatever ailed you—approximately one line of powder daily. A born promoter, Mariani landed endorsements for his product from celebrities on both sides of the Atlantic—including Thomas Edison, Queen Victoria, and three popes.
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Pemberton was obsequious in his 1884 invention French Wine Coca—a thinly veiled knockoff of Mariani. Pemberton’s formula differed by only a few extra ingredients, the most significant being kola nut, a stimulant chewed by manual laborers in West Africa containing caffeine in higher concentrations than tea or coffee. After scraping along for fifteen years in Atlanta’s patent medicine industry, Pemberton finally hit pay dirt with this new beverage, selling French Wine Coca by the case.
His timing, however, was impeccably bad. In November 1885, Atlanta declared it would be joining many states and counties in banning alcohol, taking effect the following July. That gave Pemberton only a few months to retool his formula to appeal to an America newly obsessed with sobriety. That obsession, which had been slowly gaining steam for almost a hundred years, led to the creation of the soft drink industry that would assure Pemberton’s success.
In early years, in fact, most beverages in America had been alcoholic. Despite the dour image of Puritans and Pilgrims, beer was one of the first luxuries imported to New England, not to mention the cheapest form of water purification in a world of haphazard hygiene. Soon enterprising drunkards were fermenting anything they could get their hands on—Indian corn, birch bark, even twigs boiled in maple sap. Children drank hard cider at breakfast, and college students passed two-quart tankards down their cafeteria tables.
Not everyone was such a lush, however. Some abstemious colonists served nonalcoholic drinks flavored with sugar cane or juniper berries under the name “beverige,” the direct ancestors of soft drinks. Meanwhile, the well-to-do made pilgrimages to effervescent mineral springs such as those at Saratoga Springs, New York, which were thought to have healing properties. In 1767, Englishman Joseph Priestley discovered how to produce the same carbonation artificially by mixing crushed chalk with sulfuric acid to create “fixed air” (carbon dioxide), and then pumping it into water or other beverages to make them fizzy.
The discovery coincided with a growing movement against alcohol led by Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who first identified alcoholism as an addictive disease in the 1780s and spoke out for the first time against drinking by children. Over the next few decades, the growing temperance movement founded the forerunner of Alcoholics Anonymous and passed statewide prohibition laws in some thirteen states. (Difficult to enforce, many were repealed by the end of the Civil War.)
Soon, teetotalers had a new venue for socializing as well. Just after the Civil War, a Philadelphia pharmacist improved Priestley’s carbonation methods and added fruit and sugar, creating the world’s first “soda fountain.” Drugstores began sprouting elaborate marble beverage dispensers as a place for men, women, and children to all hang out together. As the patent medicine craze grew, they expanded their offerings with branded formulas, including the first trademarked soft drink, Lemon’s Superior Sparkling Ginger Ale, which appeared in 1871. Then came Hires Root Beer, a combination of pipsissewa, spikenard, dog grass, and other botanical goodies marketed as a blood purifier; followed by Dr Pepper, a Texas cherry drink touted as a digestion aid; and Moxie, a “nerve food” from Boston marketed—despite its high caffeine content—as a cure for insomnia and nervousness.
Nerves were something the newly prostrate South had in abundance. Broken by the Civil War as completely as Pickett’s Charge was broken by the Union Army at Gettysburg, the South suffered a complete disruption in its social fabric, with newly liberated black slaves, deposed plantation owners, wounded veterans, and Northern carpetbaggers all anxious to find their place in the new order. Atlanta was better off than many locales—known as the “Phoenix City” for the speed with which it rebuilt itself after the war, the city’s location at the terminus of major railway lines positioned it well for trade and manufacturing. All of the striving and ambition, however, only compounded the anxieties of urban life, providing the perfect market for a soothing nerve tonic. That’s exactly what Pemberton set out to make.
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p; Driven by the impending prohibition, Pemberton raced to remove the wine from his drink and tinkered with dozens of reformulations in the lead-up to the spring of 1886, when the annual soft drink season began. Frustrated by the bitter taste of the kola nut, he removed it entirely and replaced it with synthetic caffeine. Then, to further improve the taste of his new drink, he added sugar, citric and phosphoric acids, vanilla, lemon oil, and extracts of orange, nutmeg, and coriander. Just to make it a bit more exotic, he sprinkled in a few drops of oil derived from two trees found in China, bitter orange and cassia. To this day, no one knows the exact proportions that Pemberton used for the first batch of what would become Coca-Cola. But the vaunted secret formula is only the beginning of the lore built around Coke over the decades, which makes the drink’s origins seem more like a religious creation myth than a product formulation.
Nearly every version of the drink’s origins starts with a virgin birth in a kettle in Pemberton’s backyard. In his 1950 book The Big Drink, New Yorker writer E. J. Kahn refers to a “three-legged iron pot” stirred with a boat oar. In his 1978 Coke biography, southern historian Pat Watters makes it a “brass kettle heated over an open fire” on the authority of longtime Coke archivist Wilbur Kurtz, Jr. (For good measure, he says the formula was perfected on the same day the Statue of Liberty was unveiled in New York Harbor, which didn’t actually happen until October, some six months later.)
Reversing the spiritual order, next comes the immaculate conception, when Coke’s trademark fizziness is added accidentally at Jacob’s Pharmacy, the soda fountain around the corner from Pemberton’s factory. In some accounts, it’s a random soda jerk too lazy to walk to the fresh water tap who adds the soda water instead. In others, it’s pharmacy owner Willis Venable himself. An heir to the Coca-Cola fortune, Elizabeth Candler Graham, even gives the name of a man, John G. Wilkes, who came in asking for a hangover remedy and accidentally got one with a fizz.
However romantic these accounts may be, all of them are fanciful revisions, if not outright fabrications. Firsthand accounts dug up by more recent Coke biographers such as Mark Pendergrast and Frederick Allen describe Pemberton’s pharmacy laboratory as state-of-the-art for the time, with a forty-gallon copper kettle beneath an enormous sand filter built into the ceiling above. A contemporary account by Pemberton’s nephew confirms that the idea from the beginning was to sell the drink carbonated; all spring, in fact, runners were sent back and forth from the headquarters of Pemberton Chemical Company to Jacob’s Pharmacy for soda water to use in testing the drink. Even the claim made at the World of Coca-Cola that Pemberton created an entirely new category of beverage—cola—is a stretch, since fountain drinks containing kola nut, such as Kola Phosphate and Imperial Inca Cola, had been served for several years before 1885.
The truth puts the company into a bind, however, since dispelling the myth would force the company to explain the drink’s origins in the shady patent medicine industry. Over the years, Coca-Cola has worked to construct its image as zealously as any medicine show barker hoping to win over a new potential client. Like them, the company has learned that it’s not what the product actually contains, but what a customer thinks it represents that is important (even if that means distancing themselves from the showmen who first taught that lesson).
Maybe that’s why the company’s more recent official histories gloss over the truth, stating that Pemberton created the drink, “according to legend, in a three-legged brass pot in his backyard,” and that “whether by design or by accident, carbonated water was teamed with the new syrup.” In that way, the company is able to preserve its mythology while still technically being truthful. Whatever the facts, promotion of the drink was conceived right along with the drink. Everyone agrees the name Coca-Cola was coined by one of Pemberton’s partners, Frank Robinson, who riffed off the alliteration popular in the names of Atlanta patent medicine at the time. A Yankee from Maine by way of Ohio, Robinson had shown up at Pemberton’s door a year earlier with a special printer that could produce two colors at one time, quickly taking over advertising and marketing for Pemberton Chemical Company. One of his first acts was to write out Coca-Cola’s distinctive cursive trademark, done with a flourish in Spencerian script, a flowing font then taught in grammar schools.
Hedging its bets between the twin crazes of patent medicines and prohibition, the label for the syrup advertised it as both an invigorating “brain tonic” and a refreshing “temperance drink.” Company lore has it that initial sales were weak, at just twenty-five gallons the first year. Pemberton didn’t live to see the drink’s eventual success. Soon after inventing Coca-Cola, he took to his bed with illness. Within two years, he died of stomach cancer. Even from his deathbed, however, he set in motion a number of backroom maneuverings that took the drink away from his partners and eventually put it into the hands of an ambitious Atlanta pharmacist, Asa Candler.
Candler is Captain Coke, the hero of Coke’s early history and the first man to espy the drink’s potential to become the great American beverage. His purchase of Coca-Cola for the paltry sum of $2,300 was hardly simple, however, taking years of legal maneuverings and possibly outright theft.
Napoleonic in stature and ambition, Candler was by all accounts a humorless workaholic who lived for his business. He neither drank nor smoked, he saved envelopes on his desk for scrap paper, and he was not above coming into the office on a Saturday to mix up a single gallon of Coca-Cola in order to make a sale. Initially, he aspired to be a doctor but changed course after realizing there was “more money to be made as a druggist.” In later years, he loved to stress the Horatio Alger roots of his story, telling people he had arrived in Atlanta in 1873 with only $1.75 in his pocket. Within a decade, he owned a chain of drugstores.
Like Pemberton, Candler knew the real money was to be found in selling patent medicines. Rather than tinker with his own formulas, however, he bought those made by others, including Botanic Blood Balm and the unfortunately named Everlasting Cologne. It was Frank Robinson who convinced Candler to buy Coke just a few years after Pemberton invented it. Ill and in need of cash, Pemberton had sold two-thirds of the company out from under his partners in 1887, leaving Robinson—the adman who named Coke—with nothing. Livid at seeing his hard work taken away from him, Robinson cajoled Candler with visions of Coke’s national potential—and with its efficacy at treating headaches, which Candler had suffered from all of his life. Swayed by the hard sell, Candler quietly began buying up outstanding shares by any means possible. On two occasions, according to Coke historian Mark Pendergrast, documents seem to include forged signatures, including Pemberton’s own signature on a bill of sale signed with his son (who died soon after, under mysterious circumstances). Perhaps to cover his tracks from those early misdeeds, Candler later had all of the earliest records of the company burned.
At any rate, once he had the company under his control, Candler wasted no time spreading the drink around the country. His business model was simplicity itself—the company mixed sugar and water to create the syrup, added the flavoring, and sold jugs of the stuff to drugstores to peddle in their soda fountains for a nickel a drink. At those prices, however, the company wasn’t going to make money unless it sold a lot of drinks. That is where Frank Robinson comes in, since it was Candler’s quiet sidekick who directed the early strategy for selling the product.
Put in charge of sales and marketing, Robinson in large part literally gave the drink away, handing out tickets for free Cokes all over Atlanta and mailing them to Atlanta’s most prominent citizens. Later he expanded the practice into a Victorian precursor to the now ubiquitous “reward cards” at stores promising discounts in exchange for customers’ personal information. Each soda fountain operator got free syrup for 256 glasses of Coca-Cola, provided it gave the company names and addresses for 128 of its best customers, who then received free drink tickets. Soon the company was sending out coupons for more than 100,000 drinks a year. The buzz was well worth the cost. Sales took off as
soon as Candler took over, multiplying nearly ten times between 1889 and 1891, from around 2,000 to nearly 20,000 gallons a year. Within another two years, sales had more than doubled again to nearly 50,000 gallons.
No doubt, those sales had something to do with the kick early imbibers got from the drink, from its namesake ingredient—cocaine. The World of Coca-Cola never mentions the word, of course, and the company goes out of its way to deny it whenever the issue crops up. Present Coke archivist Phil Mooney states flatly in a posting on Coke’s corporate website: “Coca-Cola has never used cocaine as an ingredient.”
At best, that claim is a technicality, since early formulas for Coke called for coca leaf, not cocaine, though it amounts to the same thing. Apparently no records survive showing how much Pemberton put in the drink, though one early copy of the formula held by a descendant of Frank Robinson calls for a relatively small one-twentieth of a grain per dose. When Candler took over the company, he reduced the amount of cocaine and caffeine over the span of several years in response to growing public controversy. Even so, an analysis by the president of the Georgia Pharmaceutical Association in 1891 found what amounted to one-thirtieth of a dose per glass, shrugging that off as “so small that it would be simply impossible for anyone to form the cocaine habit from drinking Coca-Cola.”
Candler picked up on that diagnosis, including it in a 1901 pamphlet. That didn’t stop him, however, from simultaneously touting the narcotic kick on his letterhead, identifying Coke as “containing the tonic properties of the wonderful COCA PLANT and the famous COLA NUT.” Pamphlets he handed out to retailers claimed the syrup “contains, in a remarkable degree, the tonic properties of the wonderful Erythroxylon Coca Plant of South America.” Candler even admitted on the stand in trial in 1901 that the drink contained “a very small proportion” of cocaine, which wasn’t entirely removed until around 1906.
The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World's Favorite Soft Drink Page 2