Secret Formula: The Inside Story of How Coca-Cola Became the Best-Known Brand in the World
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Secret Formula: The Inside Story of How Coca-Cola Became the Best-Known Brand in the World
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Overview
Secret Formula follows the colorful characters who turned a relic from the patent medicine era into a company worth $80 billion. Award-winning reporter Frederick Allen’s engaging account begins with Asa Candler, a nineteenth-century pharmacist in Atlanta who secured the rights to the original Coca-Cola formula and then struggled to get the cocaine out of the recipe. After many tweaks, he finally succeeded in turning a backroom belly-wash into a thriving enterprise.
In 1919, an aggressive banker named Ernest Woodruff leveraged a high-risk buyout of the Candlers and installed his son at the helm of the company. Robert Woodruff spent the next six decades guiding Coca-Cola with a single-minded determination that turned the soft drink into a part of the landscape and social fabric of America. Written with unprecedented access to Coca-Cola’s archives, as well as the inner circle and private papers of Woodruff, Allen’s captivating business biography stands as the definitive account of what it took to build America’s most iconic company and one of the world’s greatest business success stories.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504019835 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 10/27/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 510 |
| Sales rank: | 472,081 |
| File size: | 12 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Frederick Allen was an award-winning reporter and political columnist with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution from 1972 to 1987, after which he joined CNN as a chief analyst and commentator covering the 1988 presidential election. His essays for the program Inside Politics earned CNN a CableACE Award, and Allen was called the “best political analyst” by the editors of the Hotline.
Allen is the author of three books, including his history of the Coca-Cola Company, Secret Formula; Atlanta Rising, a history of modern Atlanta; and A Decent, Orderly Lynching, an account of the vigilantes of Montana. He was honored by the Western History Association with the inaugural Michael P. Malone Award for his research into vigilante symbolism, and is currently working on a book about Theodore Roosevelt.
Allen graduated from Phillips Academy (Andover) and earned a BA in journalism from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He and his wife, Linda, live in Atlanta, Georgia, and Big Sky, Montana.
Read an Excerpt
Secret Formula
By Frederick Allen
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1994 Frederick Lewis Allen IIIAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1983-5
CHAPTER 1
STIRRINGS
It took two men to invent Coca-Cola, and they could hardly have been more different.
With his full, flowing black beard and dark eyes, John Stith Pemberton was a familiar figure on the streets of Atlanta in the years after the Civil War. A handsome man, a Confederate veteran and war hero, "Doc" Pemberton was a pharmacist who liked to dabble with patent medicines. In the spring of 1886, stirring up the contents of a forty-gallon brass kettle with a wooden oar, he brewed the first batch of a dark, sugary syrup meant to be served with carbonated water and sold at the city's soda fountains. The most successful soft drink of all time was born.
But it wasn't Coca-Cola until it had a name, and it got that from another man. Frank Mason Robinson was a Yankee and a veteran of the Union Army. Standing barely five feet tall, with jug ears, sad eyes, and a drooping moustache, Robinson was an easy man to overlook, as most historians have. He arrived in Atlanta in December 1885, went into partnership with Pemberton, and got the inspiration of naming the new syrup after two of its ingredients, the coca leaf and the kola nut. He liked the alliteration. Robinson changed the K in kola to a C for uniformity's sake, put in a hyphen, and then wrote out a label in longhand in the careful Spencerian script that would become the best-known trademark in the world.
Legend credits Pemberton with being the father of Coca-Cola, but Robinson was the father of the idea of Coca-Cola, and it was Robinson who kept the venture going through the early years when it very nearly died. He did so even though Pemberton tried to cheat him out of the business.
Doc Pemberton earned his nickname in 1850, at the age of nineteen, when he paid $5 for a temporary physician's license issued by the board of the Southern Botanico-Medical College in Macon, Georgia.
His studies were in a discipline known as the Thomsonian School, whose founder, Samuel Thomson of New Hampshire, believed that most human ills could be cured by inciting high fevers and forcibly cleansing the digestive system. Thompson advocated vapor baths, strong emetics, and the use of preparations made of herbs, plants, and other vegetable matter. His recommended cure for nephritis, or kidney disease, for instance, was a compound of equal portions of wild carrot seeds, spearmint, milkweed, juniper berries, queen of the meadow, and dwarf elder. The dose was a pint a day.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, the Thomsonians were considered quacks, even in an era when the state of Georgia still licensed doctors to perform bloodletting and prescribe such remedies as mercury, opium, and blisters. Thomson himself was once indicted for murder in the death of a patient. But for all their foolishness, the Thomsonians nonetheless were knowledgeable about botany and chemistry. Their little two-year college in Macon offered a fairly solid course of training in pharmacology, and Pemberton, providentially for all concerned, was drawn in the direction of the laboratory rather than the practice (or malpractice) of medicine.
Abandoning a career as a doctor, Pemberton settled in the bustling Georgia river town of Columbus and was married in 1853 to a fifteen-year-old girl named Ann Eliza Clifford Lewis. In 1855, he opened a wholesale and retail drug business specializing in materia medica. An old ad lists drugs, medicines, oils, paints, glass, dye stuffs, perfumery, fancy articles, brushes, surgical instruments, gold foil, cigars, and burning fluid among the articles for sale at Pemberton & Carter.
Pemberton demonstrated a pair of aptitudes in this early period before the war. He had a knack for mixing up potions in the back room, and he had a habit of borrowing money and not paying it back. The two went together. Pemberton dreamed of making a vast fortune with his inventions, and he was likable and convincing enough to get others to put up the stakes. He managed to cajole the then enormous sum of $10,000 from his wife and her father, Colonel Elbert Lewis. A nephew recalled listening once as Pemberton mused about creating an artificial food that would be based exclusively on the body's needs. On that occasion, Pemberton had laughed at himself: "No chemist," he admitted ruefully, "can improve on milk, eggs, beefsteak, and cornbread." But he did not give up so easily in his other ambitions.
Pemberton's headstrong nature showed itself clearly during the Civil War. He joined the Confederate Army and was commissioned as a lieutenant colonel in the 3rd Georgia Cavalry, but he quit almost immediately because he disliked taking orders. He formed a pair of state militia units he could command himself, and he was wounded by shot and saber defending a bridge during the Battle of Columbus.
After the war, resuming his drug business in Columbus, Pemberton sold nutmeg and pepper to the government and began experimenting again with his kettles and percolators. Often he stayed up tinkering into the wee hours. This was the heyday of the patent medicine era, and Pemberton was anxious to stop selling other people's products and begin selling his own.
The postwar, sharecropper South was a region desperate for remedies of every sort. Most people suffered from inadequate diets, and the poor still subsisted on a so-called white diet of the three M's — meat, meal, and molasses — that led to widespread malnutrition. In rural areas, undrained swamps were like giant petri dishes, crawling with disease. The long, hot Southern summers bred insects, spoiled food, and drove children outside barefoot where they caught hookworm. Many households lacked even the rudimentary sanitation of the outhouse. Confederate veterans returned home with aching, lingering wounds and maladies. On top of it all, the region's poverty and rural isolation led to a grinding, dispiriting boredom that made many Southerners susceptible to the relief found in little brown bottles that contained alcohol or laudanum and other opiates.
There was nothing the least bit funny about the forces of ignorance and impoverishment that scourged the South, but no one with a touch of larceny in his heart could contemplate the various cures and nostrums on the market without an appreciative chuckle and a touch of envy. The sheer audacity of the claims made on behalf of some of the elixirs was breathtaking. A pharmaceutical house in Philadelphia, for instance, was selling something called Stadiger's Aurantii for $1 a bottle and promising in newspaper ads that it would cure torpidity of the liver, biliousness, nervous dyspepsia, indigestion, irregularity of the bowels, constipation, flatulence, eructations and burning of the stomach, miasma, malaria, bloody flux, chills and fever, chronic diarrhea, breakbone fever, loss of appetite, headache, foul breath, irregularities incidental to females, bearing-down pains, and backache. Whole pages of the newspaper were devoted to products and pitches worthy of P. T. Barnum (including some by Barnum himself). If people would buy "Dr. Dye's Celebrated Voltaic Belt with Electric Suspensory Appliances, for Nervous, Debilitated Young Men," surely they would buy anything.
Pemberton wanted to get in on the act. The thing he lacked was capital, and he went looking for it in Atlanta.
In 1870, Pemberton, his wife, and their teenage son Charles, joined the 21,789 souls who were hard at work trying to rebuild Atlanta.
The city was founded in 1837 as the southern railhead of the Western and Atlantic Railroad and was burned to the ground by General Sherman during his march to the sea in 1864. Six years later, it was a study in contrasts: a raw, unfinished place, but one full of towering aspirations. The streets were not yet paved — the city code provided a fine of $100 or thirty days in jail for any merchant who swept paper, fuel, slop, or washings out the door on the dusty downtown boulevards — but the DeGive Opera House was completed in plenty of time for the celebrated actor Edwin Forrest to visit on tour and play Hamlet.
In the agrarian South, other cities moved at the seasonal pace of planting and harvest, but Atlanta was born to the clack of the rails and the fast rhythm of commerce. Atlanta's cash crop was cash. With the collapse of the South's plantation economy, country stores sprouted up in small towns and crossroads communities all across the region, and Atlanta was a natural distribution center for the goods that stocked the shelves. At times it seemed everyone in town was a carpetbagger, ex-sutler, Yankee drummer, immigrant peddler, or former farm boy trying to make himself over into a real-life Rhett Butler.
Nothing symbolized Atlanta's hunger for wealth and respectability more than the hotel that was thrown open to the public on October 17, 1870. Operating mostly on borrowed money, Hannibal I. Kimball, a financier of such aggression he was called "a steam engine in breeches," built the largest public accommodation in the South in a record time of seven months. The six-story Kimball House, topped with a mansard roof and ornamental towers, was the first building in Atlanta with passenger elevators and a central heating plant. There was no particular need for a new hotel so huge and grand, but as the Atlanta Constitution exulted in a page-one story, it was "a brilliant augury of our assured development and commercial importance." With its $20,000 worth of Brussels carpeting and parlors filled with gold-mounted walnut furniture, the Kimball House stood as an announcement to the world that the city of Atlanta was open for business.
Fittingly, Doc Pemberton ended up in the lobby of the Kimball House. In a city bursting with commercial energy, he found the epicenter and set up shop. In the coming years, Pemberton ran a succession of retail and wholesale drug outlets and formed more than a dozen partnerships and corporations with investors who pumped thousands of dollars into his new sideline of proprietary medicines. Pemberton's fanciful inventions included Indian Queen Hair Dye, Gingerine, Triplex liver Pills, and a blood fortifier called Compound Extract of Stillingia or Queen's Delight His first modest financial success was with a croup cure known as Globe Flower Cough Syrup.
During the 1870s, Pemberton gained prominence. His laboratories were used by the state of Georgia to test agricultural chemicals, and one of his employees became the first state chemist. When the state created an examining and licensing board for pharmacists, Pemberton served as a charter member. By all accounts, Pemberton was a popular and respected figure in the community. A newspaper reporter described his "pleasant, benign face ... patriarchal beard and kindly eyes."
Yet there was a growing sentiment among a small group of his former partners that Pemberton could not be trusted. A man named A. F. Merrill filed suit in 1876, claiming that Pemberton sold him the rights to Globe Flower Cough Syrup and Compound Extract of Stillingia for $6,000 — $4,000 in cash and two notes of $1,000 each — but refused to transfer the formulas and ingredients and later resold the same rights to other people. Other lawsuits leveled similar accusations.
Still, Pemberton was doing well enough in 1879 that he began withdrawing from the drug business to give his full attention to manufacturing proprietary medicines. His next product was his most successful. It involved a new drug with remarkable properties that Pemberton thought gave "a sense of increased intelligence and a feeling as though the body was possessed of a new power formerly unknown to the individual...." Cocaine.
At lunch one day in the summer of 1884, Ulysses S. Grant bit into a peach and felt a stinging pain so sharp he thought he might have swallowed a bee.
It was not until autumn that the former president saw his doctor and learned he had cancer of the throat. By then it was too late.
Grant's slow, lingering death became a subject of morbid fascination all across the country. Despite the scandals that tarnished his second term in the White House, Grant was still the most beloved public figure in the United States. He was even admired in the South, whose people he had defeated in war. The newspapers in New York City, where Grant lived, set up a spirited competition to disclose as many lurid details about the old general's suffering as they could. One enterprising reporter bragged about seducing a servant girl in an apartment across 66th Street so he could gain access to a window and spy into Grant's bedroom.
As the months passed, Grant decided to cooperate in the death watch. In the spring he was moved to a cottage at Mount McGregor in the Adirondacks, and on mornings when he felt up to it he would dress in a suit, top hat, and slippers and sit on the porch in a wicker chair while tourists filed by to pay their final respects. Grant gave his doctors wide latitude to disclose the particulars of his worsening condition and even agreed to let selected reporters enter his sickroom and observe him. One account described how Grant, unable to swallow because of the agony, dribbled soup down his chin.
One of the things the American people learned about Grant's illness was that he gained relief from his dreadful, wracking pain by using a new miracle drug called cocaine. Some newspapers were so unfamiliar with the substance they called it "cocoacine," but they explained that it was applied both locally as an anesthetic and internally to provide comfort.
The man who provided the cocaine for Grant, and who made sure through promotions and advertising that as many people as possible knew that he did, was a Corsican-born, Paris-based chemist and entrepreneur named Angelo Mariani. Well before Sigmund Freud wrote his treatise Uber Coca, well before Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes and his "seven percent solution," Angelo Mariani was hard at work selling the world on the wondrous properties of the coca leaf.
Peruvians had been chewing coca leaves for stimulation for centuries, of course, but it was only in the mid-1800s that European doctors succeeded in isolating the active alkaloid, cocaine, and found that it made an excellent local anesthetic useful in eye, nose, and throat surgery. One of the pioneers, a Parisian doctor named Charles Fauvel, introduced the drug to his pharmacist, Mariani, who in turn began thinking of ways to get this miracle drug on the market. Mariani tried mixing cocaine with a variety of other ingredients (including tea and pâté) but found his greatest success with a wine-and-cocaine cordial he named Vin Mariani. By the early 1880s, from his sprawling brick factory on the Rue de Chartres in suburban Paris, Mariani was directing a global enterprise.
Mariani's favorite promotion was the use of endorsements by celebrities, and over the years he assembled quite a remarkable roster. President Grant's physicians, Drs. Fordyce Barker, John H. Douglas, and George Shrady, furnished statements praising Vin Mariani. So did Sarah Bernhardt, William McKinley, Thomas Edison, Pope Pius X, Emile Zola, Lillian Russell, Henry Irving, and ex-Emperor Don Pedro of Brazil. Some of the testimonials Mariani collected may have been forged or sent in by underlings, but in all he eventually published fourteen leather-bound volumes containing statements of tribute from hundreds of composers, artists, singers, actors, writers, and other luminaries. Almost all of them sounded genuinely enthusiastic.
Exactly what Vin Mariani did for its devotees is a matter of some guesswork. Mariani's formula called for one-tenth of a grain of cocaine per ounce, and the recommended dosage was a "claret-glass" three times a day, after meals. Assuming a wine glass held five ounces, a consumer would ingest a grain and a half a day, or by modern measure about one hundred milligrams — roughly equivalent to the familiar "line" of cocaine that users were snorting in the form of white powder a century later. There is no scientific measure for determining what constitutes a "buzz," but it seems safe to assume that Vin Mariani provided one, especially at 22 proof.
The popularity of Vin Mariani inspired imitations on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, for example, Parke Davis & Company trotted out a Coca Cordial, and in Atlanta, Doc Pemberton created Pemberton's French Wine of Coca.
Pemberton made no pretense of originality. The recipe for wine coca was available from the French Pharmaceutical Codex and other sources, and he admitted later to a reporter that he "followed very closely the most approved French formula." Pemberton did make one slight adjustment, however, by adding in a pinch of another popular new drug, extract of the African kola nut.
Pemberton set up his new operation at 59 South Broad Street in downtown Atlanta, hired a small work force of laborers, and began manufacturing French Wine of Coca in tall, English-style flint bottles for sale at $1 apiece. Sales of French Wine of Coca took off toward the end of 1884, and Pemberton claimed that on one memorable Saturday in the summer of 1885 he sold 888 bottles. At the age of fifty-four, after years of striving, Doc Pemberton had a success on his hands.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Secret Formula by Frederick Allen. Copyright © 1994 Frederick Lewis Allen III. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction: Red Scare,One: Stirrings,
Two: Dope,
Three: Dobbs,
Four: Bottled-Up Anger,
Five: "Get Your Readiness",
Six: Short Sales,
Seven: Pepsi,
Eight: War,
Nine: Black and White,
Ten: Politics,
Eleven: "Octogenarians!",
Twelve: New Coke,
Image Gallery,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,
Acknowledgments,
About the Author,
