Cola cola

Coca Cola’s first bottling plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA circa 1899.

Originally marketed as a temperance drink and intended as a patent medicine, it was invented in the late 19th century by John Stith Pemberton in Atlanta, Georgia.

He had served in the Third Georgia Cavalry Battalion and had made his living as a chemist and a pharmacist. He had studied at the Reform Medical College in Macon, Georgia, and became a licensed practitioner of Thomsonian medicine, which relies on the principles of botany and herbalism to rid the body of harmful toxins. This form of medical practice had always been seen with distrust and suspicion, but John Pemberton still went on to successfully practice his trade before eventually earning a degree in pharmacy at a school in Philadelphia, shortly before the start of the Civil War in 1861.

Pemberton served in the Army and he sustained a saber wound to the chest which nearly killed in at the Battle of Columbus in April 1865. Although he survived, he was besieged with the crippling pain which accompanied his injuries, and his caretakers gave him morphine to ease the pain. Though it soothed it, Pemberton soon became addicted to morphine, as he relied on it more and more to manage his pain.

This 1900 photo shows a Coca-Cola delivery truck with three young boys sitting on side of truck.

Falling back on his education as a pharmacist and herbalism, John Pemberton set out in search of a cure for addiction. He began to experiment with various herbs and plants, including the coca leaf, which, as many know by now, is the raw material used in the production of cocaine. He mixed coca leaves, wine, and kola nuts (in case that cocaine didn’t offer a big enough caffeine kick), and called it ‘Pemberton’s French Wine Coca’. The drink, advertised as an anti-depressant, a painkiller, and an all-around aphrodisiac, worked to relieve the ails of Pemberton’s opioid addiction.

This 1921 photo was featured in The Coca-Cola Bottler magazine.

Pemberton then began marketing to the general public to immediate success. Unfortunately, his start in the business also saw the start of Prohibition, so he found a way to still sell the drink by removing the alcohol content from the drink’s recipe in 1886, replacing the wine with a sugary syrup. He worked together with his long time partner, Willis E. Venable, and they rebranded the item Coca-Cola, which they would have intended for medicinal use had they not accidentally added carbonated water to the mixture. Instead of scrapping the idea, they marketed the confection as a refreshing soft drink.

The drink soon caught on and became a global success. However, the success would evade Pemberton. Although the drink had initially relieved some of his pain, it only provided temporary relief and he fell back to his morphine addiction. It cost him his life’s savings to feed and he was forced to sell the rights to his creation to various business partners just to make ends meet.

Drivers stand beside their delivery trucks outside the bottling plant building in 1921.

John Pemberton died of stomach cancer in 1888, broke and in the grips of addiction. He left his fortune, which at that time consisted only of his remaining shares in the Coca-Cola company, to his only son, Charles. Charles, a morphine addict himself, would die a mere six years after his father, missing out on the tremendous popularity and success Coca-Cola would see the world over, by several years.

A statute of John Pemberton was erected near the World of Coca Cola[1] in Georgia, USA, where he had first invented the drink.

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