The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [6]
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.
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