On March 29, 1886, an Atlanta pharmacist named John Pemberton stirred up a new syrup in a big brass pot in his backyard. He was looking for a tonic that would taste good and help with headaches. He took a small sample down to Jacobs' Pharmacy, where it was mixed with carbonated water and sold for five cents a glass. Customers liked it. Pemberton's bookkeeper, Frank Robinson, suggested a name, wrote it out in his fancy curly handwriting, and the world had Coca-Cola.
In its first year, Coca-Cola sold an average of just nine drinks per day in one single Atlanta drugstore. Pemberton, sadly, was sick and short on money, so he sold most of his rights to a businessman named Asa Candler, who turned out to be a marketing genius. Candler gave away free coupons, plastered the Coca-Cola logo on calendars, clocks, and trays, and within a decade was selling the drink all over the United States. The famous contoured glass bottle, designed in 1915, was meant to be recognizable even if you felt it in the dark or saw it broken on the ground.
Today, around 2.2 billion servings of Coca-Cola are consumed every single day in more than 200 countries. The company's secret recipe is supposedly kept in a vault in Atlanta. The original drink contained tiny traces of a cocaine-like plant extract, which were removed in 1903. Pemberton died less than two years after his invention, never knowing that his backyard syrup would become one of the most recognized brand names on Earth, sold everywhere from Antarctic research stations to space stations.
