John Stith Pemberton, the creator of Coca-Cola,…
1887 CE
John Stith Pemberton, the creator of Coca-Cola, was born to James Clifford Pemberton (born 1803 in North Carolina) and Martha L. Gant (born 1803 in Virginia), both of English descent.
Though born in Knoxville, Georgia, Pemberton, as a young child, had moved with his family.
Pemberton had been wounded in the Battle of Columbus, Georgia, in April 1865, and like many wounded veterans, had become addicted to morphine.
Searching for a cure for this addiction, he had begun experimenting with coca and coca wines, eventually creating his own version of Vin Mariani, a European coca wine, containing kola nut and damiana, which he had called Pemberton's French Wine Coca.
With public concern about drug addiction, depression and alcoholism among veterans, and "neurasthenia" among "highly-strung" Southern women, his medicinal concoction is advertised as being particularly beneficial for "ladies, and all those whose sedentary employment causes nervous prostration, irregularities of the stomach, bowels and kidneys, who require a nerve tonic and a pure, delightful diffusible stimulant." (Mark Pendergrast, For God, Country, and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company that Makes It, Basic Books: enlarged 2nd edition (2000), p.24.)
Pemberton had found himself forced to produce a nonalcoholic alternative to his French Wine Coca in 1886, when Atlanta and Fulton County enacted temperance legislation.
Pemberton had relied on Atlanta druggist Willis Venable to test, and help him perfect, the recipe for the beverage, which recipe he had formulated by trial and error.
With Venable's assistance, Pemberton had worked out a set of directions for its preparation that eventually included blending the base syrup with carbonated water by accident when trying to make another glass.
Pemberton had decided then to sell it as a fountain drink rather than a medicine.
Frank Mason Robinson had come up with the name "Coca-Cola" for the alliterative sound, which was popular among other wine medicines of the time.
Although the name quite clearly refers to the two main ingredients, the controversy over its cocaine content will later prompt The Coca-Cola Company to state that the name was "meaningless but fanciful."
Robinson also hand-wrote the Spencerian script on the bottles and ads.
Pemberton makes many health claims for his product, marketing it as "delicious, refreshing, exhilarating, invigorating" and touting it as a "valuable brain tonic" that will cure headaches, relieve exhaustion and calm nerves.
It is initially sold as a patent medicine for five cents a glass at soda fountains, which are popular in the United States at this time due to the belief that carbonated water is good for the health.