The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [7]
However romantic these accounts may be, all of them are fanciful revisions, if not outright fabrications. Firsthand accounts dug up by more recent Coke biographers such as Mark Pendergrast and Frederick Allen describe Pemberton’s pharmacy laboratory as state-of-the-art for the time, with a forty-gallon copper kettle beneath an enormous sand filter built into the ceiling above. A contemporary account by Pemberton’s nephew confirms that the idea from the beginning was to sell the drink carbonated; all spring, in fact, runners were sent back and forth from the headquarters of Pemberton Chemical Company to Jacob’s Pharmacy for soda water to use in testing the drink. Even the claim made at the World of Coca-Cola that Pemberton created an entirely new category of beverage—cola—is a stretch, since fountain drinks containing kola nut, such as Kola Phosphate and Imperial Inca Cola, had been served for several years before 1885.
The truth puts the company into a bind, however, since dispelling the myth would force the company to explain the drink’s origins in the shady patent medicine industry. Over the years, Coca-Cola has worked to construct its image as zealously as any medicine show barker hoping to win over a new potential client. Like them, the company has learned that it’s not what the product actually contains, but what a customer thinks it represents that is important (even if that means distancing themselves from the showmen who first taught that lesson).
Maybe that’s why the company’s more recent official histories gloss over the truth, stating that Pemberton created the drink, “according to legend, in a three-legged brass pot in his backyard,” and that “whether by design or by accident, carbonated water was teamed with the new syrup.” In that way, the company is able to preserve its mythology while still technically being truthful. Whatever the facts, promotion of the drink was conceived right along with the drink. Everyone agrees the name Coca-Cola was coined by one of Pemberton’s partners, Frank Robinson, who riffed off the alliteration popular in the names of Atlanta patent medicine at the time. A Yankee from Maine by way of Ohio, Robinson had shown up at Pemberton’s door a year earlier with a special printer that could produce two colors at one time, quickly taking over advertising and marketing for Pemberton Chemical Company. One of his first acts was to write out Coca-Cola’s distinctive cursive trademark, done with a flourish in Spencerian script, a flowing font then taught in grammar schools.
Hedging its bets between the twin crazes of patent medicines and prohibition, the label for the syrup advertised it as both an invigorating “brain tonic” and a refreshing “temperance drink.” Company lore has it that initial sales were weak, at just twenty-five gallons the first year. Pemberton didn’t live to see the drink’s eventual success. Soon after inventing Coca-Cola, he took to his bed with illness. Within two years, he died of stomach cancer. Even from his deathbed, however, he set in motion a number of backroom maneuverings that took the drink away from his partners and eventually put it into the hands of an ambitious Atlanta pharmacist, Asa Candler.
Candler is Captain Coke, the hero of Coke’s early history and the first man to espy the drink’s potential to become the great American beverage. His purchase of Coca-Cola for the paltry sum of $2,300 was hardly simple, however, taking years of legal maneuverings and possibly outright theft.
Napoleonic in stature and ambition, Candler was by all accounts a humorless workaholic who lived for his business. He neither drank nor smoked, he saved envelopes on his desk for scrap paper, and he was not above coming into the office on a Saturday to mix up a single gallon of Coca-Cola in order to make a sale. Initially, he aspired to be a doctor but changed course after realizing there was “more money to be made as a druggist.” In later years, he loved to stress the Horatio Alger roots of his story, telling people he had arrived in Atlanta