The First Coke?
Coca-Cola is the world’s best-known brand. In 2012, more than 1.8 billion people in more than 200 countries drank a Coke every day — that’s about one can or bottle for every four human beings on the planet.
To create all the world’s Coke takes 79 billion gallons of water every year, added to a secret syrup of sugar (or high-fructose corn syrup), caffeine, coca leaf extract and flavourings. And an estimated eight thousand billion gallons of water is used to make the bottles and cans each year.
When chemist John Stith Pemberton, from the U.S. state of Georgia, created the original Coca-Cola formula in 1886 in a pharmacy in the state capital Atlanta, he labelled it a ‘brain tonic’. The first advertisements promised that it ‘Cures Morphine and Opium Habits and Desire for Intoxicants’.
Pemberton’s inspiration was a popular concoction called Vin Mariani, created by Angelo Mariani, a chemist from Corsica in 1863. It consisted of Bordeaux red wine infused with a sizeable pinch of cocaine, which was legal in most countries in the 19th century, and was said to give a galvanic energy boost.
The anti-alcohol Temperance movement in the Deep South of the U.S. was opposed to Vin Mariani. Pemberton’s version was alcohol-free, a soft soda drink made from sugar syrup spiced with citric acid, nutmeg, vanilla, Chinese cinnamon oil and the two ingredients which gave Coca-Cola its name – kola nut powder to deliver a caffeine kick, and coca leaf extract which contained trace quantities of cocaine.
The first Coca-Cola outlet was Joe Jacob’s pharmacy in Atlanta. Pemberton sold his undiluted syrup to Jacobs, and customers had their drinks mixed and served at the soda fountain on the first floor, at five cents a glass — sitting at the marble-topped counter, in a magnificent bar with floor-to-ceiling windows.
All Pemberton’s quack cures and fruit remedies couldn’t cure his drug addiction. He died in 1888, shortly after selling the formula for Coca-Cola and all his shares in the business to another Atlanta pharmacist, a workaholic Methodist named Asa Candler.
The first Coke bottles were all shapes and colours: clear, green, brown, straight-sided, squat and all other sorts. The classic design, known as the ‘hobbleskirt’, that became the brand’s signature did not appear until 1916.
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