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Dr. John S. Pemberton (inventor of Coca-Cola)

By Jack Hayes
Nation's Restaurant News, 30 (February 1996): 120-121
Reprinted with permission.

It was a prohibition law, enacted in Atlanta in 1886, that persuaded physician and chemist Dr. John Stith Pemberton to rename and rewrite the formula for his popular nerve tonic, stimulant and headache remedy, "Pemberton's French Wine Coca," sold at that time by most, if not all, of the city's druggists.

So when the new Coca-Cola debuted later that year--still possessing "the valuable tonic and nerve stimulant properties of the coca plant and cola nuts," yet sweetened with sugar instead of wine--Pemberton advertised it not only as a "delicious, exhilarating, refreshing and invigorating" soda-fountain beverage but also as the ideal "temperance drink."

Though Pemberton died just two years later--five months, in fact, after his March 24, 1888, filing for incorporation of the first Coca-Cola Co.--the trademark he and his partners created more than one hundred years ago can claim wider recognition today than that of any other brand in the world.

And the Coca-Cola beverage, whose unit sales totaled a mere 3,200 servings in 1886 ("nine drinks per day" based on the twenty-five gallons of syrup sold to drugstores by Pemberton Chemical Co.), is today called the world's most popular soft drink--accounting for billions of servings at restaurants in 195 countries.

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