A History of the World in 6 Glasses (20 page)

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 common 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.

As its name suggests, this was a coca-infused wine. In fact, it was just one of many attempts to imitate a particularly successful patent medicine called Vin Mariani, which consisted of French wine in which coca leaves had been steeped for six months. Vin Mariani was popular in Europe and the United States, thanks to its high cocaine content and the marketing prowess of its creator, a Corsican named Angelo Mariani. The letters of endorsement for his drink from celebrities and heads of state, including three popes, two American presidents, Queen Victoria, and the inventor Thomas Edison, were published as a book in thirteen volumes. Pemberton copied the coca-infused wine formula and added kola extract too. The nuts of the kola plant from West Africa were another supposed wonder-cure that had become known in the West at around the same time as coca, and also had an invigorating effect when chewed, since they contain about 2 percent caffeine. As with coca leaves in South America, kola nuts were valued as a stimulant by indigenous peoples in West Africa, from Senegal in the north to Angola in the south. They were used in religious ceremonies by the Yoruba people in Nigeria; the people of Sierra Leone wrongly believed that kola nuts cured malaria. In nineteenth-century America, coca and kola often ended up being lumped together in patent medicines due to the similarity of their effects.

Just as he copied and slightly modified Mariani's formula for the drink, Pemberton also borrowed from Mariani's advertisements, claiming several celebrity endorsements as testimonials for his own drink. Sales of his French Wine Coca began to grow. But just when it seemed that Pemberton was on the right track, Atlanta and Fulton County voted to prohibit the sale of alcohol from July 1, 1886, for a two-year trial period. With the temper ance movement gaining ground, Pemberton needed to produce a successful nonalcoholic remedy, and fast. He went back to his elaborate home laboratory and started work on a "temperance drink" containing coca and kola, with the bitterness of the two principal ingredients masked using sugar. This would be no ordinary patent medicine, though; he intended it to be dispensed as a medicinal soda-water flavoring. As he refined his formula, Pem­berton sent batches of it to the neighborhood pharmacy, where it was offered to customers alongside the other flavorings. On occasion he would ask his nephew to loiter in the pharmacy to hear what other people had to say about the new drink's taste.

A Coca-Cola logo on an early bottlecap

By May 1886 Pemberton was happy with the formula; now it needed a name. One of his business associates, a man named Frank Robinson, made the obvious suggestion: Coca-Cola. The name was derived directly from the two main ingredients; Robinson later recalled that he thought "the two Cs would look well in advertising." This original version of Coca-Cola contained a small amount of coca extract and therefore a trace of cocaine. (It was eliminated early in the twentieth century, though other extracts derived from coca leaves remain part of the drink to this day.) Its creation was not the accidental concoction of an amateur experimenting in his garden, but the deliberate and painstaking culmination of months of work by an experienced maker of quack remedies.

Having invented Coca-Cola, Pemberton stood back to let Robinson, his associate, handle the manufacturing and marketing. The first advertisement for the new drink, which appeared in the
Atlanta Journal
on May 29, 1886, was short and to the point: "Coca-Cola. Delicious! Refreshing! Exhilarating! Invigorating! The new and popular soda fountain drink containing the properties of the wonderful Coca plant and the famous Cola nut." The new drink had been launched just in time for Atlanta's experiment with Prohibition. It was nonalcoholic, and it appealed as both a soda-water flavoring and a patent medicine. This was reflected in the wording of Pemberton's label, attached to the flasks of syrup supplied to pharmacists, which declared: "This Intellectual Beverage and Temperance Drink contains the valuable Tonic and Nerve Stimulant properties of the Coca plant and Cola (or Kola) nuts, and makes not only a delicious, exhilarating, refreshing and invigorating Beverage (dispensed from the soda water fountain or in other carbonated beverages), but a valuable Brain Tonic, and a cure for all nervous affections—Sick Head-Ache, Neuralgia, Hysteria, Melancholy, etc. The peculiar flavor of Coca-Cola delights every palate."

Robinson promoted the drink in a number of ways. He sent out tickets that entitled their holders to free samples of CocaCola, in the hope that they would acquire a taste for it and come back for more as paying customers. He put up posters in streetcars and banners at soda fountains that read "Drink Coca-Cola, 5c." Robinson also developed the distinctive Coca-Cola logo, in cursive script, which first appeared in a newspaper advertisement on June 16, 1887. Sales of the Coca-Cola syrup to pharmacists were running at around two hundred gallons a month at the height of the summer soda-fountain season, equivalent to about twenty-five thousand drinks. By the time Atlanta voted to discontinue its experiment with Prohibition in November 1887, Coca-Cola had established itself.

Despite the new drink's promising start, Pemberton's business associates were unhappy. For several months there was much bickering over who owned the rights to the Coca-Cola name and formula. Shares in the Pemberton Chemical Company, the entity that formally owned the rights to his patent medicines, were sold and resold, so that it was unclear who owned what. To further complicate matters, Pemberton had sold two-thirds of his Coca-Cola rights to two businessmen in July 1887, apparently because he was unwell and wanted to raise some money quickly. (He was, by this time, dying of stomach cancer.) This transaction took place behind Robinson's back; when he found out about it, he insisted that he was still entitled to use the Coca-Cola formula too. Pemberton then set up a new company that also claimed ownership over the rights. The businessmen to whom he had previously sold out became disillusioned and sold their rights to another party.

The whole mess was finally sorted out by Asa Candler, another Atlanta-based maker of patent medicines and the brother of Robinson's lawyer. He heard about the fuss surrounding the new drink, teamed up with Robinson, and then began buying out the various other parties. Nevertheless, during the summer of 1888 the ownership of Coca-Cola was still so confused that Atlanta druggists were being offered three rival versions of it: one by Candler and Robinson's new company, another by Pemberton's new company, and a third by Pemberton's rebellious son Charley.