Industry History | Coca-Cola — Five Cents at Jacobs Pharmacy

People treat Coca-Cola as a North Avenue tower that always bottled a secret formula.

The first glass was mixed at a soda fountain.

On 8 May 1886 Atlanta pharmacist John S. Pemberton carried syrup from his Marietta Street laboratory to Jacobs' Pharmacy at Peachtree and Marietta.

Willis Venable, who rented the fountain, added carbonated water instead of still water.

The drink sold for five cents.

Company and city accounts put first-year volume at about nine glasses a day.

Bookkeeper Frank M. Robinson named the product and drew the script that still sits on the can.

Pemberton sold pieces of the formula as his health failed.

Asa G. Candler assembled those rights from 1888 and incorporated The Coca-Cola Company as a Georgia corporation in 1892.

In 1919 Candler's group sold the company for $25 million in 1919 dollars to investors led by Ernest Woodruff.

The early syrup used coca-leaf extract. The company took cocaine out of the formula by 1903, after the drug had become a public problem in American cities.

A Georgia Historical Society marker now stands at the Five Points corner, in front of Georgia State University's Andrew Young School of Policy Studies.

The North Avenue headquarters site dates from 1920.

The mechanism that survived is Candler's: own the syrup, advertise the script, and let independent bottlers carry the glass.

Photo: Coca-Cola headquarters on North Avenue, Atlanta, via Wikimedia Commons.