A wounded druggist, a bookkeeper’s pen, and a bottle modeled on the wrong plant.
This is the twentieth profile in The Brand That…, a series about American brands that taught the country a habit, became the word for the thing itself, and outlived the world that made them. We tell their stories plainly and with respect — what they made, what it cost, and what they still are.
The Founding: A Wound, a Laboratory, and a Nickel Glass
The Battle of Columbus was fought on April 16, 1865, a week after Lee surrendered at Appomattox. John Stith Pemberton, a pharmacist and a Confederate officer in the local mounted guards, rode out to defend the city. The closest eyewitness later testified that he was both shot and slashed with a saber. He lived, and he came to depend on morphine, a dependence his contemporaries later described.
The history of the Coca-Cola brand begins with that wound. It also begins with a druggist who needed a product.
Pemberton moved his laboratory to Atlanta in 1869 and followed in 1870. In the 1880s he sold a nerve tonic called French Wine Coca, made of wine, coca leaf, kola nut, and damiana. Some doctors of the day promoted coca as a cure for the opium habit. In November 1885 Fulton County voted to go dry, with the saloons to close the next July. By most accounts the vote helped prompt what came next. Pemberton took out the wine, kept the coca and the kola, and sweetened what was left.
The old story puts the first batch in a brass kettle in his backyard. Historians doubt it, and the Georgia Historical Society places the work in his laboratory. By the company’s account, on May 8, 1886, Pemberton carried a jug of syrup to Jacobs’ Pharmacy, where it was mixed with soda water and sold for five cents a glass. His partner and bookkeeper, Frank Robinson, named it for its two ingredients and, in the company’s telling, thought “the two Cs would look well in advertising.” He wrote it in Spencerian script, the hand bookkeepers were taught. The company says about nine drinks a day sold that first year.
The Rise: The Script, the Bottle, and the System
Pemberton did not live to see what came of it. Sick, with the business going poorly, he sold his interest in pieces and died on August 16, 1888. Asa Candler, another Atlanta druggist, spent three years gathering the rights. By 1891 he owned the whole enterprise, for a total outlay of $2,300. He incorporated in 1892, registered the trademark in January 1893, and put the script on calendars, clocks, fountain urns, and coupons for a free glass.
Candler thought Coca-Cola belonged at the fountain, and he was wrong about bottling. In 1899 he granted the bottling rights for nearly the whole country to two Chattanooga lawyers, Benjamin Thomas and Joseph Whitehead. The price was a dollar, which legend says he never collected. The real bargain was that the bottlers would buy their syrup from his company. They sold territories to local men who put up their own money and plants. Within about twenty years, by the company’s count, there were more than a thousand bottling plants, nearly all locally owned.
Then the copies came, in straight-sided bottles with names like Koke and Toka-Cola. In 1915 the bottlers asked glassmakers for a bottle so distinct that you would know it by feel in the dark or lying broken on the ground. At the Root Glass Company in Terre Haute, Indiana, the foreman sent two men to the public library. The story is that they went looking for the plants in the drink’s name. They came back with an illustration of a cocoa pod, long and ribbed and swelling at the middle, and the bottle was modeled on it. It was the wrong plant. The design patent came through on November 16, 1915. The bottle that went into production was slimmer than the sketch, but the ribs stayed and the waist stayed. A thumb finds the ribs before the eye finds the name. More than a century later, the shape of a chocolate pod still means Coca-Cola.
In 1919 an investor group led by Ernest Woodruff bought the company for $25 million, and his son Robert came to run it. When the country went to war, Robert Woodruff set a policy that every man in uniform should be able to buy a Coke for a nickel, wherever he was, whatever it cost the company. In June 1943 Allied headquarters in North Africa cabled for bottling plants. The company counts 64 plants serving the troops abroad. Accounts differ on how much of the cost the company itself bore, and Coca-Cola was spared the sugar rationing civilians faced. By 1950 French critics had a name for the drink’s postwar spread: Coca-colonization.
At home the nickel held. A six-and-a-half-ounce Coke stayed at five cents for most of seventy years, pinned in place, the economists Daniel Levy and Andrew Young found, by the bottler contracts and by vending machines built to take a single coin. The price began to slip around 1950, when some New York stores charged six cents, and by 1959 the last nickel Cokes were gone. Around 1950, Levy and Young estimated, Coca-Cola accounted for about half the country’s soft-drink production and about 400,000 of its 460,000 bottle-vending machines.
The Turn: Seventy-Nine Days in 1985
By the early 1980s Coca-Cola was losing ground. Its lead over Pepsi had narrowed, and Pepsi was winning its own televised blind taste tests, the Pepsi Challenge. In the company’s own tests, run on nearly 200,000 people by its account, a sweeter new formula came out ahead.
Here is the case for it. Market share was slipping. A rival was winning a public contest. The company’s research pointed to the new formula. Management did not act on a whim. It acted on its evidence.
On April 23, 1985, Roberto Goizueta introduced the new Coke at Lincoln Center and retired the old formula. Some drinkers disliked the taste; others were angry for reasons no taste test measured. A Seattle man named Gay Mullins founded Old Cola Drinkers of America. One letter reached the chairman addressed to “Chief Dodo.” On July 11, seventy-nine days after the launch, the company announced that the original would return as Coca-Cola Classic.
I keep turning over whether this was a blunder or a plan. The plan theory fails on the record: the executives who were certain in April were apologizing in July. So it was a mistake. Whether it cost the company in the end is harder to say. Donald Keough, the company’s president, gave the answer I trust most: “The truth is, we’re not that dumb, and we’re not that smart.” He also conceded that all the research could not measure the attachment so many people felt to the old drink.
The Reckoning: What the System Could Not Reach
The coca leaf stayed in the formula for years, and with it a small amount of cocaine. By 1903 the leaves were spent, stripped of all but a trace, and by 1929 the extract was free of it. The company has long said cocaine was never an added ingredient. That is true as far as it goes. It came in with the leaf, in a drink made by a man who had sought relief from another drug.
The bottling system that made Coke local also put distance between Atlanta and the plants. In December 1996 gunmen shot and killed Isidro Gil, a union leader, at the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Carepa, Colombia. The plant belonged to a local bottler. Gil’s union sued the bottlers and The Coca-Cola Company in federal court in Florida, alleging that plant managers had worked with paramilitaries to destroy the union. The company denied it. In 2003 a judge dismissed the claims against Coca-Cola, ruling that its bottling agreement did not give it control over the plant’s daily operations. In 2009 the appeals court ended the remaining claims as well, holding that the complaints had not alleged enough to tie the paramilitaries to the Colombian state or to state a claim under the torture-victims law. There was never a trial, and no court weighed the evidence of what happened.
What Endures: The Promise in Every Town
The Coca-Cola Company is still headquartered in Atlanta, where the first glass was poured, and that city may one day have its own chapter in The City That…. Henrique Braun became chief executive on March 31, 2026. The company sells its drinks in more than 200 countries and territories and estimates about 2.2 billion servings a day of its beverages. They are bottled by a system of partners, some small, some spanning many countries, several of them partly owned by Coca-Cola.
Tonight a cooler hums in a gas station off a two-lane road. The bottle inside is cold and ribbed, and a hand closes around it. Frank Robinson’s lettering is on the glass. John Pemberton, who mixed the first syrup, sold his share in pieces and died before it paid. Between his laboratory and that cooler lie a nickel held for seventy years, troop ships, a formula pulled and restored, and a union man shot at a bottling plant in Colombia. All of it went into the taste of the American century.
Coca-Cola carbonated the American century, and that is worth remembering.
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Why Coca-Cola? Coca-Cola made its name the word for a cola and its bottle the shape of a soft drink. It outlived its inventor, its cocaine, its nickel price, and its own failed reformulation because its real asset was never the syrup alone — it was the script, the bottle, and a bottling system that promised the same drink in every town.
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Charles Cranston Jett is an author, civic educator, and Professional Certified Coach based in Chicago. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (Class of 1964) and Harvard Business School, he served aboard nuclear submarines during the Cold War. He is the author of six books, including Super Nuke!, hosts four podcasts, and writes across his Critical Skills Blog platform on history, leadership, and the health of the American republic. In his writing he uses AI tools for research, editing, and occasional image creation; the arguments, the voice, and the final judgment are his. He and his wife, Dr. Nancy Church, live at Water Tower Residences, where they co-host the Chicago Salons.
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