A History of the World in Six Glasses

In the 19th century, the United States was a major industrial power, exceeding even the United Kingdom, where the Industrial Revolution began. The culture of the United States was perfect for an age of mass production: because of the country’s strong emphasis on equality and reduced class boundaries, products could be mass-produced instead of being tediously tailored to each region’s preferences. By the end of the 19th century, the U.S had eclipsed Britain as the world’s leading industrial power—one sure sign of this was that British companies imported American machinery, rather than the other way around. By the 1950s, America was the world’s dominant superpower, rivaled only by the Soviet Union. With the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 90s, America remained the world’s only superpower, confirming that the 20th century was truly the “American century.”

Standage proposes that the history of American dominance on the global stage is mirrored in the history of Coca-Cola, sometimes seen as the ultimate symbol of American values and weaknesses. For some, Coke is the ultimate symbol of equality, unpretentiousness, and mass culture. For others, Coke is the symbol of capitalism, greed, imperialism, and cultural genocide.

The invention of Coca Cola was anticipated the research of the 18th century British chemist Joseph Priestley. Priestley discovered the relationship between oxygen and carbon dioxide, and is often credited with the discovery of oxygen itself. Priestley was also the first to learn how to combine gas with water to produce “sparkling water.” In 1772, he published a chemistry book in which he explained how to make sparkling water. Priestley suggested that sparkling water could be used as a medicine for fighting nausea, tiredness, and even scurvy.

For the remainder of the 18th century, sparkling water appeared as a medical beverage. The simplest sparkling waters incorporated sodium bicarbonate, abbreviated to “soda”—hence the generic name for fizzy water products. Soda became most popular in the U.S., where the chemist Benjamin Silliman began selling bottled soda water in the early 1800s. Shortly after Silliman began selling soda, Americans found other recipes for the liquid. The “wine spritzer” was invented when chemists discovered that wine mixed with soda was less intoxicating than wine by itself. Slowly, soda moved from a medicine to an ordinary beverage.

By the mid-19th century, soda was very popular in America. John Matthews, an entrepreneur, devised more than 100 patents for every stage of selling soda: bottling it, dispensing it at a soda fountain, washing the bottles, etc. Soda was perhaps the most representative mass-produced commodity in America: cheap, easy to transport, and completely interchangeable. As early as the 1890s, writers praised soda for its democratic, egalitarian implications. One writer wrote, “The millionaire may drink champagne while the poor man drinks beer, but they both drink soda water.”

In 1887, John Pemberton, a pharmacist living in Atlanta, Georgia, invented the earliest version of Coca Cola. It’s sometimes claimed that Pemberton was trying to invent a cure for headaches, but the truth is that Pemberton was responding to the trend of “miracle tonics” in the 19th century. Quack doctors sold medicines that supposedly cured diseases—though often these medicines were themselves highly dangerous. These doctors were among the first people to recognize the importance of branding and advertising: they invented slogans, logos, and ad campaigns to market their brews. Pemberton’s first attempt at a miracle-cure, which he called French Wine Coca, contained the leaves of the cocoa plant. It had been known since the 1850s that cocoa could stimulate the nervous system and lessen the appetite (cocoa leaves can also be used to produce cocaine).

Pemberton’s original recipe for French Wine Coca contained alcohol. But because he recognized the influence of the Temperance Movement, which was trying to illegalize consumption of alcohol in the U.S., he decided to produce a non-alcoholic drink. In place of wine, Pemberton added the seeds of the kola plant from West Africa, while also keeping the coco­a leaves. The result was Coca-Cola, named after the two primary ingredients in the drink. The man who named Coca-Cola was probably Frank Robinson, one of Pemberton’s business partners. It was also Robinson who designed Coca-Cola’s signature cursive logo.

Pemberton marketed Coca-Cola by claiming that it was “exhilarating” and “invigorating,” and claiming that it could cure headaches, hysteria, melancholy, and other diseases. Coca-Cola became very popular, partly because it was non-alcoholic in a time when the Temperance movement was becoming highly influential. Indeed, by 1887, Pemberton, unbeknownst to Frank Robinson, decided to sell some of his Coca-Cola company shares to other businessmen. This created a controversy, in which Robinson, Pemberton, and the businessmen who bought Pemberton’s shares all claimed to be brewers of the “real” Coca-Cola.

The “Coca-Cola war” of the late 1880s ended abruptly with Pemberton’s death from cancer. A shrewd Georgia businessman named Asa Candler then teamed up with Frank Robinson and began buying up rights to brew Coca-Cola. Candler made a moving, widely attended speech in which he claimed to have been one of Pemberton’s closest friends. Based largely on the moral weight of his supposed friendship with Pemberton (a complete lie), Candler quickly became known as the “true” brewer of Coca-Cola.

By the 1890s, Asa Candler’s Coca-Cola had become so popular that he sold more than 75,000 gallons of it every month. Coca-Cola was being sold in almost every state in the union, and some hailed it as the national beverage. Yet Candler never sold Coca-Cola in bottles—instead he sold Coke in syrup form, and customers had to brew the drink themselves by mixing the syrup with water. In the late 1890s, Candler broadened his product’s appeal by rebranding Coca-Cola as an ordinary beverage instead of a medicine. This rebranding strategy turned out to come at the perfect time: by switching Coca-Cola from a medicine to a drink, Candler avoided a costly national tax on medical tonics that could have crippled his company.

By the 1910s, Coca-Cola was being sold in bottled form. Around this time, a scientist named Harvey Washington Wiley launched a national campaign claiming that Coke caused violence, delinquency, and sexual promiscuity in its consumers. In 1911, federal cases concluded that Candler’s Coca-Cola company had the right to sell its product, since Candler didn’t claim that Coke was anything other than a caffeinated beverage. One interesting detail of this ruling, however, was that Coca-Cola couldn’t depict children in its advertisements. Indeed, Coca-Cola ads wouldn’t depict children until the 1980s. Instead of depicting children directly, Coke thus had to find other strategies for appealing to children. One of the most famous of these strategies was to depict Santa Claus with a Coke bottle. While it’s often claimed that Coke popularized the modern conception of Santa (as a fat man with a red suit and a white beard), this is a myth—by the 1930s, when Coke launched its ad campaign, the modern conception of Santa was already widely known.

During the Great Depression, Coca-Cola developed successful new strategies for selling its product. The company publicist Archie Lee approved ads depicting Coke as the ultimate social drink—a wholesome, family beverage that could be enjoyed on dates, in the home, or in shops. Largely as a result of these carefree, escapist ads, Coke became even more popular during the Depression.

In spite of its popularity during the 1930s, Coke at this time faced competition from PepsiCola. The PepsiCola company had been in existence since the 1890s, but only in the 1930s did it become a serious rival to Coke. PepsiCola benefited from the fact that its product looked and tasted like Coke—many customers mistakenly purchased Pepsi instead of Coca-Cola. This prompted a series of vicious lawsuits alleging that Pepsi was trying to imitate Coke in order to be more successful. By 1942, Pepsi and Coke had ended their legal battles, and Pepsi adopted a new label that clearly distinguished it from Coca-Cola. Ultimately, Pepsi and Coke benefited from each other’s existence, as the two companies kept each other efficient and well-managed. Today, business schools often treat the Coke-Pepsi rivalry as a good example of how competition can benefit everyone: both the companies and the consumers.