The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [3]
The theme continues as the doors open into a blinding atrium whose walls churn with words like “refresh,” “heritage,” and “optimism” printed in every language. There are more multicultural portraits here, too. A phone receiver hanging next to each one, playing a recorded loop that describes Coke-funded work to tackle HIV/AIDS in Africa, water depletion in Pakistan, and child malnutrition in Argentina. There’s even an American doctor from the Beverage Institute for Health and Wellness, which is pioneering research to counter the national childhood obesity epidemic.
If you knew nothing else about it, you’d think the Coca-Cola Company was incorporated for the sole purpose of spreading peace and social equality around the world. The real work of the museum, however, happens when visitors step out of the lobby and into the first exhibit—called “Milestones of Refreshment”—telling the story of how it all began.
“When John Pemberton invented Coca-Cola in 1886, he had no way of knowing what a phenomenon his creation would become,” narrates a soothing baritone emanating from a video screen. Upon entering, visitors meet a bronze statue of the man himself, stirring a kettle with a wooden spoon. Broad-shouldered, bearded, and wearing overalls, the man in the statue looks more like a Soviet-era paean to the proletariat than one of the great progenitors of capitalism. “His idea,” the video continues, “was to create a beverage specifically formulated to be served ice-cold.” In doing so, he “invented a completely new category for refreshment, and his formula for Coca-Cola became one of the world’s most closely guarded secrets. Still, people began to discover the most exciting thing about Coca-Cola: that it’s delicious and refreshing. And that’s no secret at all.”
The short video is impressive for hitting all of Coke’s marketing leitmotifs—Delicious. Refreshing. Ice-Cold. Secret Formula. In reality, however, it was not so poetic. Pemberton’s goal was hardly to create a new category of cold drink; like many people, he wanted to make himself rich. And in 1880, the quickest way to do that was found inside a bottle, through the creation of medicinal cure-alls called “patent medicines.” The Coca-Cola Company doesn’t like to talk about its early medicinal past; the sordid proto-history doesn’t fit in well with the clean-scrubbed mythology it promotes in the World of Coca-Cola (and more broadly in the world of Coca-Cola). Even today, however, traces of the company’s patent-medicine past are present in how it promotes and markets the drink.
The term “patent medicines” has nothing to do with the United States Patent Office, originating instead in the practice of British kings’ granting “patents of royal favor” to favorite medicine makers. A few decades after bumping up against Plymouth Rock, colonists began importing medicines like Hooper’s Pills and Daffy’s Elixir to treat rheumatism, gout, tuberculosis—even cancer. Their inventors took great pains to guard the secret formulas of their proprietary combination of ingredients. As late Atlanta historian James Harvey Young writes in the definitive Toadstool Millionaires, “Rivals might detect the major active constituents, but the original proprietor could claim that only he knew all the elements in their proper proportions.”
If Britons invented patent medicines, Americans became obsessed with them. After the Revolutionary War, vast swathes of the newly independent United States were a mucky, roadless wilderness. Doctors were scarce, and even when available, they were as apt