In 1886 an American pharmacist named John Pemberton mixed up a brown, fizzy syrup in his backyard in Atlanta, Georgia. He thought it would be a kind of headache and tiredness medicine. He called it Coca-Cola, after two of its ingredients - coca leaves and kola nuts. The first year he sold about nine glasses a day.
A businessman named Asa Candler bought the recipe a few years later and turned Coca-Cola into a worldwide drink. From the start, Candler made the exact recipe a fierce secret. He even removed all written copies from the company headquarters in 1919 and locked them in a bank.
Today the supposed original recipe sits in a special vault at the World of Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta. Tourists can walk past it. Whether the real formula is actually inside, nobody outside the company will say. And yes, for its first few years Coca-Cola really did contain a tiny amount of cocaine from the coca leaves. That was removed in 1903.
