The History of Coca Cola

Coca-Cola was originally invented by John Styth Pemberton, a pharmacist in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. In 1886, he made up a new kind of medicine to cure tiredness and headaches. Two of the most important ingredients at that time were coca leaves and kola nuts – and that’s how the drink got its name. The famous Coca-Cola logo was created by John Pemberton's bookkeeper, Frank Mason Robinson, in 1885. Pemberton sold the first glass on May 8, 1886. But it tasted revolting, and as a result almost nobody wanted to buy it. In the first year, Pemberton only made $ 50 from it! Then a businessman called Asa Griggs Candler bought the recipe in 1887 and advertised it, not as a medicine but as a refreshing drink. All he did was mix it with water and carbon dioxide! It worked. Everybody wanted to buy it and in only a few years Coca-Cola became the national drink of the United States. The shape of the famous bottle was invented in 1915 by bottle designer Earl R. Dean.

During the Second World War American soldiers drank three million bottles of Coca-Cola a day! They therefore helped to spread the name and the taste for ‘Coke’ all over the world. Today, nearly 300 million bottles are drunk every day, in 155 different countries. Anybody can try to make a drink which tastes something like Coca-Cola. Chemists say that it consists almost entirely of fourteen ingredients. They include sugar, caramel, caffeine, phosphoric acid, extract of kola nuts, cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla, glycerine, and lavender, fluid extract of guarana, lime juice, and citrus oils. The most secret ingredient is called ‘7X’, and is less than one percent of the drink. But nobody outside the Coca-Cola company has yet discovered what the ‘magic’ extra ingredient is, and very few people have ever known the secret formula of this world-famous soft drink.