This is a two-part article that looks at the story of the creation of Coca-Cola. Today I’m looking at the two versions of the story, and Wednesday I’ll look at why there are two different stories out there.
As befits a huge corporation, Coca-Cola has a large web presence, and along with descriptions of their many products (over 3,000!) there are a few pages devoted to the creation and early years of Coca-Cola.
The main creation story (click here for the corporate version), is told pretty quickly. As the company says, the product “was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on May 8, 1886. Dr. John Stith Pemberton, a local pharmacist, produced the syrup for Coca-Cola®, and carried a jug of the new product down the street to Jacobs’ Pharmacy, where it was sampled, pronounced ‘excellent’ and placed on sale for five cents a glass as a soda fountain drink.”
Sounds simple, right? Pemberton worked as a pharmacist, he produced some syrup, went to another pharmacy to sample it, they liked it, and they started selling it.
As Tom Standage outlines in A History of the World in 6 Glasses, the story was actually much more complicated than that. Pemberton’s original intention wasn’t to create a nice fizzy drink; he was trying to create a patent medicine. In the late 19th century patent medicines were cures for whatever ails you, or at least their advertising tried to get you to believe that. Patent medicine advertisements said their products could cure everything from baldness to infertility to cancer and polio. In reality, the cures were nasty concoctions that often included strong alcohol, opium, and cocaine. However, many of them sold extremely well, and there were no government regulations on what advertisements could claim or what could be sold as medicine.
Pemberton wasn’t trying to make just any patent medicine, he was specifically trying to make a copy of Vin Mariani, a French product made from wine steeped in coca leaves. However, Pemberton made two changes to the formula. He added kola extract, as kola gave an extra kick, and he left out the wine since authorities in the Atlanta area were on the verge of outlawing alcohol (this was still about 40 years before nationwide Prohibition, but the idea was popular in many regions of the country). Leaving out the alcohol allowed Pemberton to advertise Coca-Cola as both a medicine and a temperance drink.
The medicinal angle is why pharmacists were involved with all of this. Back in the 19th century they had very different ideas about medicines than we do today, and different ideas about why foods were healthful. Pharmacies had soda fountains because many of these “medicines” were distributed as soda syrup—again, this was decades before government regulation of the medicine business. In fact, Coca-Cola got out of the medical business when the government started to get involved. After 1895 they stopped advertising Coca-Cola as “a valuable Brain Tonic, and a cure for all nervous affections,” as early advertisements read, since the government instituted a tax on patent medicines.
So that’s the real story of the invention of Coca-Cola (there’s much more to the story of Coca-Cola’s rise to fame, though—read A History of the World in Six Glasses if you want more on that). The thing that seems strange to me is, why isn’t all of this on the Coca-Cola website?