Consumer History | Coca-Cola — The Five-Cent Glass at Jacobs' Pharmacy
· 1886-5
Unreviewed contributionBy kevin · · updated · Report an issue
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Consumer History | Coca-Cola — The Five-Cent Glass at Jacobs' Pharmacy
kevin
People treat Coca-Cola as a brand that was always bottled in a contour glass on a factory line.
The first pour was a nickel drink at a downtown soda fountain.
On 8 May 1886, Atlanta pharmacist John Stith Pemberton brought a jug of syrup to Jacobs' Pharmacy, at the Five Points corner of Peachtree and Marietta Streets.
Joseph Jacobs rented the fountain to Willis E. Venable. Venable mixed the syrup with carbonated water and sold the glass for five cents.
The Georgia Historical Society marker now stands on that corner, outside Georgia State University's Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at 14 Marietta Street NW. The pharmacy building is gone.
Pemberton's bookkeeper, Frank M. Robinson, named the drink and drew the script that still sits on the cans.
Atlanta Magazine, repeating the company's own first-year arithmetic, says sales ran about nine glasses a day in 1886.
Pemberton died in August 1888. Asa G. Candler had already begun buying pieces of the formula and the name.
The Coca-Cola Company's own archive records that by 30 August 1888 Candler had assembled control for $2,300 plus interest, in 1888 dollars.
He waited until 1892 to incorporate The Coca-Cola Company as a Georgia corporation.
In 1919 a syndicate that included Ernest Woodruff bought the company for $25 million. His son Robert later ran the global expansion from Atlanta.
The mechanism that left this corner was not the recipe alone. It was the decision to sell syrup to bottlers and fountains rather than own every glass.
Stand on Marietta Street and the intersection still does the work the pharmacy did: five streets meet, and the city still treats this crossing as its zero point.
Photo: Warren LeMay, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons (World of Coca-Cola facade at Pemberton Place, the later public museum for the same company; the 1886 fountain stood at this Five Points corner).
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