Coca-Cola, the brain tonic from the pharmacy

Imagine you walk into a pharmacy in Atlanta on a warm May day in 1886. Behind the marble counter stands a tall, gaunt man with a full beard, a syrup-stained apron and tired eyes. He has mixed something new: a dark, sticky syrup that he tops up with soda water into a fizzy, sweet lemonade. Five cents a glass. He calls the whole thing a “valuable brain tonic”.

You take a sip.

You have just drunk Coca-Cola.

John Stith Pemberton, the man behind the counter, is a pharmacist. In the American Civil War he was struck by a sabre while fighting for the Confederacy and has helped himself against the pain with morphine ever since — an addiction he never shakes off. All his life Pemberton searches for the one great remedy. Something for the tiredness. Something for the headaches. Something for the whole post-war era. He first tries “Pemberton’s French Wine Coca”, a wine enriched with coca leaf extract modelled on the Vin Mariani popular in Europe. It goes quite well.

Then Atlanta votes for prohibition.

Pemberton has to reformulate. He throws out the wine, replaces it with sugar syrup, keeps the coca leaf extract, adds kola nut (for alertness) and mixes the whole thing at the soda fountain with carbonated water as a trial. His bookkeeper, Frank Mason Robinson, suggests a name — and writes it down straight away in that flowing Spencerian script that today adorns every red can in the world: Coca-Cola. The most famous line of lettering in advertising history is a bookkeeper’s handwriting.

On 8 May 1886 the new tonic goes on sale at Jacobs’ Pharmacy in Atlanta. It is meant to help against headaches. Against tiredness. And against — here the advertising of the time became particularly inventive — “nervous afflictions”. As was usual back then, nobody lists on the label what is actually in it.

We shall do it anyway.

The coca leaf contains cocaine. Not much — estimates run to a few milligrams per glass — but enough that the advertising claims (“invigorates”, “clears the mind”, “lifts you up”) suddenly acquire a rather different reading. The kola nut contains caffeine. The syrup contains sugar. And when the soda fountain foamed you got, in short, a fairly committed cup of coffee — only cold, sweet, and with an additional pharmacon that today one would expect in an evidence locker rather than at a soda fountain.

In 1886 nobody thought anything of it. Cocaine counted as modern, clean, scientific. Two years earlier Sigmund Freud had published his well-known paean “Über Coca”. Merck in Darmstadt produced the alkaloid on an industrial scale. Anyone with toothache brushed it away with cocaine-containing drops.

In Atlanta it was simply sold cold, in a glass.

The real drama of the story, though, plays out not at the soda fountain but in Pemberton’s bank statements. He is ill, still tormented by pain, still addicted. He needs money. He sells the shares in his tonic off piece by piece to various business partners. One of them, Asa Griggs Candler, consolidates the rights and founds the Coca-Cola Company in 1892. Pemberton himself dies in Atlanta on 16 August 1888. Broke. He never lived to see what became of his brain tonic.

Around 1903 Coca-Cola took the cocaine out of the recipe. What remained was sugar, caffeine and a trick involving “decocainised” coca leaf, which is still used as a flavouring (and, the company says, still is today). The brand became what everyone now knows from every airport, every war and every lunch menu: the most frequently spoken two-syllable brand word in the world.

Which leaves the punchline that pharmacists in particular may appreciate about the whole affair: the world’s most iconic drink — the one with the red can, the Santa Clauses, the polar bears, all of it — was not invented by a marketing genius, not in a corporation, not in a laboratory.

It was prescribed at the soda fountain of a pharmacy. For headaches. Five cents a glass.

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