Stronger! stronger! grow they all,
Who for Coca-Cola call.
Brighter! brighter! thinkers think,
When they Coca-Cola drink.
—Coca-Cola advertising slogan, 1896
INDUSTRIALISM AND CONSUMERISM first took root in Britain, but the United States is where they truly flourished, thanks to a new approach to industrial production. The preindustrial way to make something was for a craftsman to work on it from start to finish. The British industrial approach was to divide up the manufacturing process into several stages, passing each item from one stage to the next, and using labor-saving machines where possible. The American approach went even farther by separating manufacturing from assembly. Specialized machines were used to crank out large numbers of interchangeable parts, which were then assembled into finished products. This approach became known as the American system of manufactures, starting with guns, and then applied to sewing machines, bicycles, cars, and other products. It was the foundation of America’s industrial might, since it made possible the mass production and mass marketing of consumer goods, which quickly became an integral part of the American way of life.
The circumstances of nineteenth-century America provided the ideal environment for this new mass consumerism. It was a country where raw materials were abundant and skilled workers were always at a premium; but the new specialized machines allowed even unskilled workers to produce parts as good as those made by skilled machinists. The United States also mostly lacked the regional and class preferences of European countries; that meant a product could be mass-produced and sold everywhere, without the need to tailor it to local tastes. And the nation’s railway and telegraph networks, which spread across the country after the end of the Civil War in 1865, made the whole country into a single market. Soon even the British were importing American industrial machinery, a sure sign that industrial leadership had passed from one country to the other. By 1900 the American economy had overtaken Britain’s to become the largest on Earth.
During the nineteenth century America focused its economic power inward; during the twentieth century the nation directed it outward to intervene decisively in two world wars. The United States then settled into a third, a cold war with the Soviet Union; the two sides were evenly matched in military terms, so the contest became one of economic power, and ultimately the Soviets could no longer afford to compete. By the end of the century, justly called the American century, the United States stood unchallenged as the world’s only superpower, the dominant military and economic force in a world where different nations are interconnected more tightly than ever by trade and communications on a global scale.
The rise of America, and the globalization of war, politics, trade, and communications during the twentieth century, are mirrored by the rise of Coca-Cola, the world’s most valuable and widely recognized brand, which is universally regarded as the embodiment of America and its values. For those who approve of the United States, that means economic and political freedom of choice, consumerism and democracy, and the American dream; for those who disapprove, it stands for ruthless global capitalism, the hegemony of global corporations and brands, and the dilution of local cultures and values into homogenized and Americanized mediocrity. Just as the story of Britain’s empire can be seen in a cup of tea, so the story of America’s rise to global preeminence is paralleled in the story of Coca-Cola, that brown, sweet, and fizzy beverage.
The direct ancestor of Coca-Cola and all other artificially carbonated soft drinks was produced, oddly enough, in a brewery in Leeds around 1767 by Joseph Priestley, an English clergyman and scientist. Priestley was first and foremost a clergyman, despite his unconventional religious views and a pronounced stutter, but he still found time to pursue scientific research. He lived next door to a brewery and became fascinated by the gas that bubbled from the fermentation vats, known simply at the time as “fixed air.” Using the brewery as his laboratory, Priestley set about investigating the properties of this mysterious gas. He started by holding a candle just above the surface of the fermenting beer and noted that the layer of gas extinguished the flame. The smoke from the candle was then carried along by the gas, rendering it briefly visible, and revealing that it ran over the sides of the vat and fell to the floor. This meant the gas was heavier than air. And by pouring water quickly and roughly between two glasses held over a vat, Priestley could cause the gas to dissolve in the water, producing “exceedingly pleasant sparkling water.” Today we know the gas as carbon dioxide, and the water as soda water.
One of the theories circulating about fixed air at the time was that it was an antiseptic, which suggested that a drink containing fixed air might be useful as a medicine. This would also explain the health-giving properties of natural mineral waters, which were often effervescent. Priestley presented his findings to the Royal Society in London in 1772 and published a book, titled Impregnating Water with Fixed Air, the same year. By this time he had devised a more efficient way to make his sparkling water, by generating the gas in one bottle from a chemical reaction and passing it into a second bottle, inverted and filled with water. Once enough gas had built up in the second bottle, he shook it to combine the gas with the water. For the medical potential of his work Priestley was awarded the Copley Medal, the Royal Society’s highest honor. (Carbonated water was wrongly expected to be particularly useful at sea, for use against scurvy; this was before the effectiveness of lemon juice had become widely understood.)
Priestley himself made no attempt to commercialize his findings, and it seems that Thomas Henry, a chemist and apothecary who lived in Manchester, was the first to offer artificially carbonated water for sale as a medicine, sometime in the early 1770s. He followed the efforts to make artificial mineral waters very closely and was convinced of their health benefits, particularly in “putrid fevers, dysentery, bilious vomitings, etc.” Using a machine of his own invention, Henry was able to produce up to twelve gallons of his sparkling water at a time. In a pamphlet published in 1781, he explained that it had to be “kept in bottles very closely corked and sealed.” He also recommended taking it in conjunction with lemonade—a mixture of sugar, water, and lemon juice—so that he may have been the first to sell a sweet, artificially fizzy drink.
Joseph Priestley, who in 1772 published a book explaining how to make soda water
During the 1790s scientists and entrepreneurs across Europe went into business making artificial mineral waters for sale to the public with varying degrees of success. Torbern Bergman, a Swedish scientist, encouraged one of his pupils to set up a small factory, but it was so inefficient that the woman employed to do the bottling had only three bottles an hour to seal. More successful was the venture established by a mechanic named Nicholas Paul in Geneva, in conjunction with Jacob Schweppe, a financier. Paul’s method for carbonating the water was declared by physicians of Geneva in 1797 to surpass all others, and the firm was soon doing a thriving trade, even exporting its bottled water to other countries by 1800. Paul and Schweppe parted company and set up rival firms in Britain. Schweppe’s firm produced more mildy carbonated water, which seems to have better suited British tastes; it was generally believed that water with fewer bubbles more closely imitated natural mineral water, and a cartoon from the period depicts drinkers of Paul’s beverage as overinflated balloons.
Some of the new artificial mineral waters were prepared using sodium bicarbonate, or soda, so that soda water became the generic term for such drinks. They were strictly medical beverages until 1800; doctors prescribed them for various ailments, and they were considered a form of patent medicine by the British government, which imposed a duty of three pence on each bottle. One medical writer referred in 1798 to the “soda water” made and sold by Schweppe, and a London advertisement of 1802 states that “the gaseous alkaline water commonly called soda water has long been used in this country to a considerable effect.”
However, soda water proved to be most popular in America. As in Europe, there was much scientific interest in the properties of natural mineral waters, and the possibilities of imitating them. The eminent Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush investigated the mineral waters of Pennsylvania and reported his findings to the American Philosophical Society in 1773. Two other statesman-scientists, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, also took an interest in the medicinal properties of mineral waters. The natural springs of Saratoga in upper New York State were particularly renowned at the time. George Washington visited them in 1783 and expressed sufficient interest that the following year a friend wrote to him to describe attempts to bottle the waters: “What distinguishes these waters … from all others … is the great quantity of fixed air they contain… . The water … cannot be confined so that the air will not, somehow or another, escape. Several persons told us that they had corked it tight in bottles, and that the bottles broke. We tried it with the only bottle we had, which did not break, but the air found its way through a wooden stopper and the wax with which it was sealed.”
In the United States, soda water moved from scientific curiosity to commercial product with the help of Benjamin Silliman, the first professor of chemistry at Yale University. He went to Europe in 1805 to collect books and apparatus for his new department and was struck by the popularity of the bottled soda water being sold in London by Schweppe and Paul. On his return he began to make and bottle soda water for his friends and was immediately overwhelmed by demand. “Finding it quite impossible with my present means to oblige as many as call upon me for soda water, I have determined to undertake the manufacture of it on the large scale as it is done in London,” he wrote to a business associate. He began selling bottled water in 1807 in New Haven, Connecticut.
Others soon followed in other cities, notably Joseph Hawkins in Philadelphia, who devised a new way to dispense soda water: through a fountain. Hawkins’s aim was to imitate the spas and pump rooms built over natural springs in Europe, where the mineral water could be dispensed directly into glasses. According to a description of his spa-room from 1808, “The mineral water … is raised from the fountain or reservoir in which it is prepared under ground, through perpendicular wooden columns, which enclose metallick tubes, and by turning a cock at the top of the columns, the water may be drawn without the necessity of bottling.” Hawkins was granted a patent for this invention in 1809. But the idea of selling soda water in spalike settings proved unpopular. Instead, apothecaries came to dominate the trade. By the late 1820s the soda fountain had become a standard feature of the apothecary’s shop; the soda water was prepared and dispensed on the spot, rather than being sold in bottles (though bottled waters were imported from Europe, and Saratoga water was successfully bottled for sale starting in 1826).
Like so many other drinks before it, soda water started out as a specialist medicine and ended up in widespread use as a refreshment, with its medical origins granting it a comforting underlying respectability. As early as 1809 an American chemistry book noted that “soda water is also very refreshing, and to most persons a very grateful drink, especially after heat and fatigue.” As well as being consumed on its own, it could be used to make sparkling lemonade, almost certainly the first modern fizzy drink. It was also being mixed with wine on both sides of the Atlantic by the early nineteenth century; one English observer noted that “when mixed with wine it is found that a much smaller quantity of wine satisfies the stomach and the palate, than wine does alone.” Today we call this mixture a wine spritzer. But from the 1830s, and particularly in the United States, soda water was principally flavored using specially made syrups.
The American Journal of Health noted in 1830 that such syrups “are employed to flavor drinks and are much used as grateful additions to carbonic acid water.” Syrups were originally handmade from mulberries, strawberries, raspberries, pineapples, or sarsaparilla. Special dispensers were added to soda fountains, which started to become increasingly elaborate. Blocks of ice were added to chill both the soda water and the syrups. By the 1870s the largest soda fountains were enormous contraptions. At the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, James Tufts, a soda-fountain magnate from Boston, displayed his Arctic Soda Water Apparatus. It was thirty feet high, towering over the spectators, and was adorned with marble, silver fittings, and potted plants. It was manned by immaculately dressed waiters and had to be housed in its own specially designed building. A testament to inventiveness and marketing prowess, this display generated plenty of orders for Tuft’s American Soda Fountain Company.
The soda-water business was also becoming industrialized behind the scenes, thanks to businessmen such as John Matthews, a veteran of the British soda-water trade who moved to New York. Initially, he focused on making and selling his own soda water, and then on selling soda fountains, but when his son (also called John) joined the business, he expanded in a new direction. A prolific inventor, the younger Matthews devised specialized machinery to automate every aspect of the soda-water business, from carbonation to bottle washing, and he began selling this machinery to other firms. By 1877 the company had amassed over one hundred patents and had sold over twenty thousand machines. Its catalog offered “a complete establishment for making and bottling soda water, ginger ale, etc using corks” for the sum of $1,146.45. This included the apparatus and raw materials to generate the gas, two fountains to carbonate the water, a bottling machine, fifty gross of bottles, flavoring extracts, and colorings. Matthews’s inventions were displayed at exhibitions and won awards around the world. They epitomized the American approach to mass production: Specialized machines handled each step of the process, the bottles and stoppers were standardized, interchangeable parts, and the resulting drink, produced cheaply in large quantities, had mass appeal.
Indeed, soda water, produced on an industrial scale and consumed by rich and poor alike, seemed to capture something of the spirit of America itself. Writing in Harper’s Weekly in 1891, the author and social commentator Mary Gay Humphreys observed that “the crowning merit of soda-water, and that which fits it to be the national drink, is its democracy. The millionaire may drink champagne while the poor man drinks beer, but they both drink soda water.” Her suggestion that soda water could claim to be America’s national drink was, however, only half right. A new national drink was indeed emerging at the time— but soda water was only the half of it.
In May 1886 John Pemberton, a pharmacist who lived in Atlanta, Georgia, invented a drink. According to the Coca-Cola Company’s official version of the story, he was a tinkerer who stumbled on the right combination of ingredients by accident, while trying to devise a cure for headaches. One afternoon he mixed various ingredients in a three-legged pot to create a caramel-colored liquid, which he then took to a nearby pharmacy, combining the liquid with soda water to create the sweet, fizzy, and invigorating drink—Coca-Cola—that would eventually reach nearly every corner of the world. The real story is rather more complicated, however.
Pemberton was, in fact, an experienced maker of patent medicines, the quack remedies that were hugely popular in America in the late nineteenth century. These pills, balsams, syrups, creams, and oils were generally triumphs of advertising over pharmacology. Some were harmless, but many contained large amounts of alcohol, caffeine, opium, or morphine. They were sold through newspaper advertisements, and their production became a huge industry after the Civil War, as veterans took to dosing themselves. The popularity of patent medicines reflected a general distrust of conventional medicines, which were often expensive and ineffective. Patent medicines offered an alluring alternative, marketed as they were on the basis of exotic ingredients or the medical knowledge of Native Americans, and under names with religious, patriotic, or mythological overtones: Munson’s Paw-Paw Pills to Coax Your Liver into Action, Dr. Morse’s Indian Root Pills, and so on.
There was nothing to stop manufacturers of such medicines from making outrageous claims about their effectiveness. The Elixir of Life sold by a Dr. Kidd, for example, claimed to cure “every known ailment… . The lame have thrown away crutches and walked after two or three trials of the remedy… . Rheumatism, neuralgia, stomach, heart, liver, kidney, blood and skin diseases disappear as by magic.” The newspapers that printed such advertisements did not ask any questions. They welcomed the advertising revenues, which enabled the newspaper industry to expand enormously; by the end of the nineteenth century patent medicines accounted for more newspaper advertising than any other product. The makers of St. Jacob’s Oil, which was said to remedy “sore muscles,” spent five hundred thousand dollars on advertising in 1881, and some advertisers were spending more than one million dollars a year by 1895.
The patent-medicine business was among the first to recognize the importance of trademarks and advertising, of slogans, logos, and hoardings. Since the remedies themselves usually cost very little to make, it made sense to spend money on marketing. With so many competing products on the market, however, only 2 percent of them made a profit, according to one estimate. But those that did succeed made fortunes for their inventors. One of the most famous was Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. It was said to be “a positive cure for all those painful Complaints and Weaknesses so common to our best female population. … It removes faintness, flatulency, destroys all craving for stimulants, and relieves weakness of the stomach.” Customers were encouraged to write to Pinkham for medical advice, even after her death in 1883, which was kept quiet. They received form letters in return, invariably recommending the use of more of her compound. When analyzed in the early twentieth century, it was found to contain 15 to 20 percent alcohol. Ironically, women temperance campaigners were among its most fervent users.
Pemberton’s own attempts to make patent medicines had met with mixed success. At times his remedies produced a solid income, but during the 1870s he had a run of bad luck. He was declared bankrupt in 1872, and his attempts to get back on his feet were hampered by two fires that destroyed his stock. But he continued to develop new patent medicines in the hope that one of them would make him rich. Finally, in 1884, he started to get somewhere, thanks to the popularity of a new patent-medicine ingredient: coca.
The leaves of the coca plant had long been known among South American peoples for their stimulating effect; coca was known as “the divine plant of the Incas.” Chewing a small ball of the leaves releases tiny quantities of an alkaloid drug, cocaine. In small doses this sharpens the mind, much like caffeine, and suppresses the appetite, making possible long treks across the Andes with very little food or sleep. Cocaine was isolated from coca leaves in 1855, and it then became the subject of much interest among Western scientists and doctors, who thought it might help to cure opium addicts by providing an alternative. (They were unaware that cocaine was just as addictive.) Pemberton followed the discussion of coca in the medical journals closely, and by the 1880s he and other patent-medicine makers were incorporating it into their tablets, elixirs, and ointments. Pemberton’s contribution to this burgeoning field was a drink called French Wine Coca.
As its name suggests, this was a coca-infused wine. In fact, it was just one of many attempts to imitate a particularly successful patent medicine called Vin Mariani, which consisted of French wine in which coca leaves had been steeped for six months. Vin Mariani was popular in Europe and the United States, thanks to its high cocaine content and the marketing prowess of its creator, a Corsican named Angelo Mariani. The letters of endorsement for his drink from celebrities and heads of state, including three popes, two American presidents, Queen Victoria, and the inventor Thomas Edison, were published as a book in thirteen volumes. Pemberton copied the coca-infused wine formula and added kola extract too. The nuts of the kola plant from West Africa were another supposed wonder-cure that had become known in the West at around the same time as coca, and also had an invigorating effect when chewed, since they contain about 2 percent caffeine. As with coca leaves in South America, kola nuts were valued as a stimulant by indigenous peoples in West Africa, from Senegal in the north to Angola in the south. They were used in religious ceremonies by the Yoruba people in Nigeria; the people of Sierra Leone wrongly believed that kola nuts cured malaria. In nineteenth-century America, coca and kola often ended up being lumped together in patent medicines due to the similarity of their effects.
Just as he copied and slightly modified Mariani’s formula for the drink, Pemberton also borrowed from Mariani’s advertisements, claiming several celebrity endorsements as testimonials for his own drink. Sales of his French Wine Coca began to grow. But just when it seemed that Pemberton was on the right track, Atlanta and Fulton County voted to prohibit the sale of alcohol from July 1, 1886, for a two-year trial period. With the temperance movement gaining ground, Pemberton needed to produce a successful nonalcoholic remedy, and fast. He went back to his elaborate home laboratory and started work on a “temperance drink” containing coca and kola, with the bitterness of the two principal ingredients masked using sugar. This would be no ordinary patent medicine, though; he intended it to be dispensed as a medicinal soda-water flavoring. As he refined his formula, Pemberton sent batches of it to the neighborhood pharmacy, where it was offered to customers alongside the other flavorings. On occasion he would ask his nephew to loiter in the pharmacy to hear what other people had to say about the new drink’s taste.
A Coca-Cola logo on an early bottlecap
By May 1886 Pemberton was happy with the formula; now it needed a name. One of his business associates, a man named Frank Robinson, made the obvious suggestion: Coca-Cola. The name was derived directly from the two main ingredients; Robinson later recalled that he thought “the two Cs would look well in advertising.” This original version of Coca-Cola contained a small amount of coca extract and therefore a trace of cocaine. (It was eliminated early in the twentieth century, though other extracts derived from coca leaves remain part of the drink to this day.) Its creation was not the accidental concoction of an amateur experimenting in his garden, but the deliberate and painstaking culmination of months of work by an experienced maker of quack remedies.
Having invented Coca-Cola, Pemberton stood back to let Robinson, his associate, handle the manufacturing and marketing. The first advertisement for the new drink, which appeared in the Atlanta Journal on May 29, 1886, was short and to the point: “Coca-Cola. Delicious! Refreshing! Exhilarating! Invigorating! The new and popular soda fountain drink containing the properties of the wonderful Coca plant and the famous Cola nut.” The new drink had been launched just in time for Atlanta’s experiment with Prohibition. It was nonalcoholic, and it appealed as both a soda-water flavoring and a patent medicine. This was reflected in the wording of Pemberton’s label, attached to the flasks of syrup supplied to pharmacists, which declared: “This Intellectual Beverage and Temperance Drink contains the valuable Tonic and Nerve Stimulant properties of the Coca plant and Cola (or Kola) nuts, and makes not only a delicious, exhilarating, refreshing and invigorating Beverage (dispensed from the soda water fountain or in other carbonated beverages), but a valuable Brain Tonic, and a cure for all nervous affections—Sick Head-Ache, Neuralgia, Hysteria, Melancholy, etc. The peculiar flavor of Coca-Cola delights every palate.”
Robinson promoted the drink in a number of ways. He sent out tickets that entitled their holders to free samples of Coca-Cola, in the hope that they would acquire a taste for it and come back for more as paying customers. He put up posters in streetcars and banners at soda fountains that read “Drink Coca-Cola, 5c.” Robinson also developed the distinctive Coca-Cola logo, in cursive script, which first appeared in a newspaper advertisement on June 16, 1887. Sales of the Coca-Cola syrup to pharmacists were running at around two hundred gallons a month at the height of the summer soda-fountain season, equivalent to about twenty-five thousand drinks. By the time Atlanta voted to discontinue its experiment with Prohibition in November 1887, Coca-Cola had established itself.
Despite the new drink’s promising start, Pemberton’s business associates were unhappy. For several months there was much bickering over who owned the rights to the Coca-Cola name and formula. Shares in the Pemberton Chemical Company, the entity that formally owned the rights to his patent medicines, were sold and resold, so that it was unclear who owned what. To further complicate matters, Pemberton had sold two-thirds of his Coca-Cola rights to two businessmen in July 1887, apparently because he was unwell and wanted to raise some money quickly. (He was, by this time, dying of stomach cancer.) This transaction took place behind Robinson’s back; when he found out about it, he insisted that he was still entitled to use the Coca-Cola formula too. Pemberton then set up a new company that also claimed ownership over the rights. The businessmen to whom he had previously sold out became disillusioned and sold their rights to another party.
The whole mess was finally sorted out by Asa Candler, another Atlanta-based maker of patent medicines and the brother of Robinson’s lawyer. He heard about the fuss surrounding the new drink, teamed up with Robinson, and then began buying out the various other parties. Nevertheless, during the summer of 1888 the ownership of Coca-Cola was still so confused that Atlanta druggists were being offered three rival versions of it: one by Candler and Robinson’s new company, another by Pemberton’s new company, and a third by Pemberton’s rebellious son Charley.
Ultimately, it was John Pemberton’s death from cancer, on August 16, 1888, that enabled Candler to consolidate his control over Coca-Cola. Candler called the city’s druggists together and delivered a moving and entirely insincere speech. Pemberton was not just one of Atlanta’s foremost druggists, he declared, but a good man and close friend; he suggested that the druggists ought to close their shops on the day of Pemberton’s funeral as a mark of respect. With this speech, and by acting as a pallbearer at the funeral, Candler succeeded in convincing everyone that he had Pemberton’s best interests at heart, and that his version of Coca-Cola was, as it were, the real thing. Pretending that Pemberton had been a close friend was an outright lie. Yet in a way it became true retrospectively. For it is only thanks to Candler that Pemberton is remembered today at all. Without Asa Candler’s efforts, Coca-Cola would never have become the success that it did.
When he first secured the rights to Coca-Cola, for a mere $2,300, Asa Candler regarded it as merely one of his many patent medicines. But as sales continued to grow—they quadrupled in 1890, to reach 8,855 gallons—Candler decided to abandon his other remedies, none of which was anything like as popular. Coca-Cola was even selling during the winter, outside the usual soda-fountain season. So Candler hired traveling salesmen to sell Coca-Cola to pharmacists in neighboring states, gave away more free tickets to lure new customers, and pumped money into advertising. By the end of 1895 annual sales exceeded 76,000 gallons, and Coca-Cola was being sold in every state in America. The company’s newsletter boasted that “Coca-Cola has become a National drink.”
This rapid growth was possible because the Coca-Cola Company only sold syrup; it did not sell the finished product of syrup mixed with soda water. Candler was strongly opposed to the idea of selling Coca-Cola in bottles, since he was worried that the drink’s taste might suffer during storage. Expanding into a new city or state, then, simply meant striking deals with local pharmacists and then shipping the syrup and its associated advertising materials: banners, calendars, and other items that featured the company’s red-and-white logo. Since Atlanta was a major hub on the nation’s railway network, distribution was not a problem. And pharmacists liked the drink because it was profitable: Each five-cent Coca-Cola they sold only required one cent’s worth of syrup, and most of the rest was pure profit. The Coca-Cola Company, in turn, could make the syrup for around three-quarters of a cent per drink, so it made a profit on every drink sold too.
Downplaying Coca-Cola’s supposed medical attributes, a sudden shift in strategy, also helped to boost sales. Until 1895 it was still being sold as a primarily medicinal product— described as a “Sovereign Remedy for Headache” and so on. But selling Coca-Cola as a remedy risked limiting the market to those who identified with the symptoms it was supposed to cure. Selling it simply as a refreshing drink, in contrast, gave it universal appeal; not everyone is ill, but everyone is thirsty at one time or another. So out went the gloomy advertisements listing ailments and maladies, and in came a cheerier, more direct approach: “Drink Coca-Cola. Delicious and Refreshing.” Where previous advertisements had aimed Coca-Cola at harried, overworked businessmen looking for a headache cure or tonic, the new advertisements recommended the drink to women and children. This change of emphasis was, it turned out, fortuitously timed. In 1898 a tax was imposed on patent medicines, a category which was initially deemed to include Coca-Cola. The company fought the decision and ultimately won exemption from the tax, but it could only do so because it had repositioned Coca-Cola as a drink rather than a drug.
Sales were also driven, ironically, by the introduction of bottled Coca-Cola. Candler had always been opposed to the idea, but in July 1899 he granted two businessmen, Benjamin Thomas and Joseph Whitehead, the right to bottle and sell Coca-Cola. At the time Candler thought this was an unimportant deal, and did not even make the two men pay for the bottling rights; instead, he simply agreed to sell them the syrup, just as he sold it to soda-fountain owners. If bottling took off, he would sell more syrup; if it failed, as he expected, he would not lose anything. In fact, bottling proved enormously successful. Bottled Coca-Cola opened up entirely new markets, because it could now be sold anywhere—at grocery stores and at sporting events, for example—not just at soda fountains. Thomas and Whitehead soon realized that rather than doing the bottling themselves, it made much more sense to sell subsidiary bottling rights to others, in return for a large cut of the profits. In so doing, they created a lucrative franchise business and made Coca-Cola available in every town and village in the United States. The characteristic Coca-Cola bottle, with its distinctive shape, was introduced by the company in 1916.
Coca-Cola’s distinctive glass bottle, introduced in 1916
Bottled Coca-Cola took off just as public concern was growing over the dangers of patent medicines, and harmful additives and adulterants in food. Leading the charge was Harvey Washington Wiley, a government scientist, who was particularly concerned about the danger posed by quack remedies to children. His years of campaigning were rewarded in 1906 with the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, generally known as “Dr. Wiley’s Law.” At first it seemed that the new rules would benefit Coca-Cola, which proudly advertised that it was “Guaranteed under the Pure Food and Drugs Act,” by doing away with some of its more dubious rivals. But the following year Wiley announced his intention to investigate Coca-Cola on the grounds that it contained caffeine. His complaint was that, unlike tea and coffee, Coca-Cola, which was now available across America, was drunk by children. Parents were, he argued, generally unaware of the presence of caffeine and did not realize that their children were taking a drug.
Just as Kha’ir Beg had put coffee on trial in Mecca in 1511, Wiley put Coca-Cola on trial in 1911, in a federal case titled The United States v. Forty Barrels and Twenty Kegs of Coca-Cola. In court, religious fundamentalists railed against the evils of Coca-Cola, blaming its caffeine content for promoting sexual transgressions; government scientists expounded on the effects of Coca-Cola on rabbits and frogs; and expert witnesses put forward by the Coca-Cola Company spoke up in the drink’s favor. The month-long trial made for great theater, with accusations of jury rigging and sensationalist coverage: “Eight Coca-Colas Contain Enough Caffeine to Kill,” screamed one headline, entirely incorrectly. The problem with Wiley’s case was that it was founded on moral rather than scientific objections. Nobody disputed that there was caffeine in Coca-Cola; the question was whether it was harmful, and to children in particular. The scientific evidence suggested that it was not. Besides, Wiley was not trying to ban tea or coffee.
So in the end the case came down to the narrow question of whether the Coca-Cola Company misrepresented its product, and whether it could claim that the drink was indeed “pure.” Ultimately, the court found in Coca-Cola’s favor: Its name accurately reflected the presence of kola, which contains caffeine. And since caffeine had always been part of the formula for Coca-Cola, it did not count as an additive—so the drink was indeed “pure.” That said, this second part of the ruling was subsequently overturned on appeal, and an out-of-court settlement was agreed in which the amount of caffeine in Coca-Cola was reduced by half. The company also promised not to depict children in its advertisements, a policy it maintained until 1986. But the important thing was that the sale to children of Coca-Cola, a caffeinated drink, was now legally sanctioned. Together with the popularity of the bottled drink, this meant that Coca-Cola had successfully extended the use of caffeine, the world’s most popular drug, into realms where coffee and tea had been unable to reach.
The Coca-Cola Company found other ways of selling its product to children without depicting them directly in advertisements. By far the most famous examples are the jolly posters depicting Santa Claus drinking Coca-Cola that first appeared in 1931. It is widely but wrongly believed that through these posters, the Coca-Cola Company was responsible for creating the modern image of Santa Claus as a bearded man in a white-trimmed red suit, choosing the colors to match its own red-and-white logo. In fact, the idea of a red-suited Santa was already firmly established. The New York Times reported on November 27, 1927 that “a standardized Santa Claus appears to New York children… . Height, weight, stature are almost exactly standardized, as are the red garments, the hood and the white whiskers… . The pack full of toys, ruddy cheeks and nose, bushy eyebrows and a jolly, paunchy effect are also inevitable parts of the requisite makeup.” Putting Santa in its advertisements, however, enabled the company to appeal directly to children, and to associate its drink with fun and merriment.
The 1930s brought three challenges to the might of Coca-Cola: the end of Prohibition; the Great Depression that followed the Wall Street stockmarket crash of 1929; and the rise of a vigorous competitor, PepsiCo, with its rival drink, Pepsi-Cola. The resumption of legal sales of alcoholic drinks, which had been banned since 1920, was expected to have a particularly devastating effect on the sales of Coca-Cola. “Who would drink ‘soft stuff’ when real beer and ‘he-man’s whiskey’ could be obtained legally?” asked one press report. “Why, the case was an open and shut one: The Coca-Cola Co. was on the skids.” In fact, the repeal of Prohibition had very little effect on sales; Coca-Cola, it seemed, met a different need from alcoholic drinks. Indeed, the range of circumstances in which it was consumed continued to expand.
For some people, Coca-Cola took the place of coffee as a social drink. Unlike alcoholic drinks, it was deemed suitable for consumption at all times of day—even at breakfast—and, of course, by people of all ages. During Prohibition, the company’s brilliant publicist, Archie Lee, carefully pushed the consumption of Coca-Cola at soda fountains as a cheery and family-friendly replacement for drinking beer or other forms of alcohol in a bar, and a way to escape the gloomy reality of the economic climate. Lee also pioneered the new technology of radio to sell Coca-Cola, and the prominent placement of the drink in numerous movies— another way of associating it with glamour and escapism. Coca-Cola’s advertisements depicted an appealingly happy, carefree world. As a result, Coca-Cola prospered during the Depression.
“Regardless of depression, weather, and intense competition, Coca-Cola continues in ever-increasing demand,” noted an investment analyst at the time. Here was a hot-weather drink that still sold in the winter, a nonalcoholic drink that could hold its own against alcoholic beverages, a drink that made caffeine consumption universal, and an affordable treat that maintained its appeal even in an economic downturn. As Harrison Jones, a company executive, put it in a rousing speech that marked the finale of the company’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations in 1936, “the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse may charge over the earth and back again—and Coca-Cola will remain!”
Some of these factors also helped Coca-Cola’s rival, Pepsi-Cola. Its origins went back to 1894, but after going through two bankruptcies it only became a serious competitor to Coca-Cola in the 1930s, in the hands of a New York businessman named Charles Guth, who owned a chain of confectionery stores and soda fountains. Rather than buy Coca-Cola for his stores, he took over the ailing Pepsi-Cola company and offered its drink instead. Sales took off when he started to offer twelve-ounce bottles at the same price (five cents) that Coca-Cola charged for a six-ounce bottle. The larger drink cost very little more to make, since most of the cost was in bottling and distribution, and it had great appeal to cash-strapped consumers. A huge legal battle ensued as the Coca-Cola Company accused its rival of trademark infringement. The case dragged on for years, doing neither company any good, and prompting an out-of-court settlement in 1942. Coca-Cola agreed to stop contesting Pepsi-Cola’s trademark, and Pepsi adopted a red, white, and blue logo that clearly distinguished it from Coca-Cola. Another outcome was that the word cola became a generic term for brown, carbonated, caffeinated soft drinks. Ultimately, the two firms benefited from each other’s existence: The existence of a rival kept Coca-Cola on its toes, and Pepsi-Cola’s selling proposition, that it offered twice as much for the same price, was only possible because Coca-Cola had established the market in the first place. The rivalry was a classic example of how vigorous competition can benefit consumers and increase demand.
By the end of the 1930s Coca-Cola was stronger than ever. Unquestionably a national institution, accounting for nearly half of all sparkling soft-drink sales in the United States, Coca-Cola was a mass-produced, mass-marketed product, consumed by rich and poor alike. In 1938 the veteran journalist William Allen White, a famous and respected social commentator, declared it to be “a sublimated essence of all that America stands for, a decent thing honestly made, universally distributed, conscientiously improved with the years.” Coca-Cola had taken over the United States; now it was ready to take over the world, going wherever American influence extended.