Coke Was a Cure-All First. Then It Became a Global Obsession

Lee Habeeb (00:10):
This is Lee Habeeb and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And we love hearing your stories. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. Up next, a story about a drink that we all know but might not know the backstory of. Here’s our own Montie Montgomery with the story.

Montie Montgomery (00:36):
Coca-Cola is arguably the South’s most successful export. They sell around three billion cases of product around the world annually, but they started out small. Here’s Larry Jorgenson, author of The Coca-Cola Trail, with more on that.

Larry Jorgenson (00:53):
Well, Coca-Cola actually started out as this syrup that is now the main ingredient in Coca-Cola. And the syrup was invented by John Pemberton, who was a pharmacist in Columbus, Georgia, and had started working on the formula. Then his time of working on the formula was interrupted by the Civil War, and he actually fought in the Civil War.

When he got out of the war, he had a war injury. You know, stories get twisted through the years—I heard it was a saber-type injury to his stomach, but whatever it was, it was definitely from the war and he was looking to—

Montie Montgomery (01:34):
Get some relief. Relief in the form of a morphine-free painkiller, as he was addicted to the substance at the time.

Larry Jorgenson (01:44):
He had studied and he had learned that the kola nut would create a pretty good flavor, and the coca leaf was known for giving some relief to pain. So he developed his formula with those two items in mind—the coca leaf and the kola nut.

Now, the coca leaf, as it was used in producing the Coca-Cola syrup, was not processed—and I get this all the time—it was not processed in a way that would produce cocaine. There was no cocaine in Coca-Cola. There was the coca leaf, which, I guess, if you broke it down far enough, you’d find common natural ingredients related to cocaine.

Montie Montgomery (02:30):
Such as ecgonine, a relative—or rather, a precursor—of cocaine.

Larry Jorgenson (02:35):
But it was not cocaine. It was simply the processed coca leaf that eliminated pain to some degree and helped create the flavor along with the kola nut of what became Coca-Cola.

He moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where he perfected his recipe. And actually, it was on March 29th, in his backyard in a big three-legged kettle, that he made the first batch of Coca-Cola syrup. And it was, as they say, for medicinal purposes. He took it to the local drugstore and they served it.

You’d come in—you have a pain, a headache, or whatever—they’d put a little Coca-Cola syrup in a glass and put in some carbonated water. It worked. But not only did it work, it tasted good. People started requesting the drink as something that they enjoyed, not necessarily to solve a headache or something. So it really took off from there.

But the irony of the thing is that the man who invented it only owned Coca-Cola syrup for about three years. He sold the rights and the formula, etc., to Asa Candler. Well, Asa’s thing in life was he wanted to sell syrup, and that’s all he wanted to do. He would sell it to other drugstores and so forth, and it was for that purpose—of that purpose only. He thought that bottling Coca-Cola was—and I will quote—“a dumb idea.”

Well, what happened was there was a gentleman in Vicksburg who owned a candy business and a soda fountain—a very ambitious man by the name of Biedenharn. And Mr. Biedenharn was obviously selling the Coca-Cola syrup in his drugstore.

Well, he also would do things like cater parties. It so happened that on one July Fourth, he was to cater a party, a picnic—a big July Fourth picnic—and bring beverages and everything. What he would do then was go to a small bottler in Vicksburg who bottled lemon, sarsaparilla, orange, and all those things. So he would go to that bottler and buy wholesale some of these bottles of soda that he would take along to the event he was catering.

Well, it so happened on this July Fourth there was such a demand for product that his order was not available. But yet, he had the customer. So Mr. Biedenharn went to the picnic and made lemonade for everybody. And after that picnic, he said, “This will never happen again.”

And he went to St. Louis and bought some secondhand bottling equipment. Now we’re talking about bottling equipment that was, you know, one bottle at a time, and you’d push a foot lever to make it happen. And he brought that back to Vicksburg and started bottling Coca-Cola. He thought, “You know, people really like this drink. I’m going to bottle it, and people in the country—I can take it to them. They don’t have to come to town to get a Coca-Cola.”

So he set off to bottle. The story is, the first two cases of Coca-Cola that he bottled, he sent them to Atlanta to Mr. Candler to let him know what he was doing. And of course, Candler was more interested in selling old Joe Biedenharn some syrup. And Candler, you know, wrote back, “Yeah, it’s okay,” but he wasn’t impressed. And Joe Biedenharn said, “You know, he never sent my bottles back.” So that was the big thing.

Lee Habeeb (06:48):
And you’re listening to the story of Coca-Cola, the South’s most successful export. It had been, right up until the 1860s, ’70s, and ’80s, cotton. And thank goodness that changed—for both health and for Coke lovers across the globe, including myself, a certified Coke addict if ever there was one. When we come back, more of this remarkable story—Coca-Cola’s rise—here on Our American Stories.

[Break]

Lee Habeeb:

And we return to Our American Stories and the story of how Coca-Cola got into a bottle. When we last left off, a man in Vicksburg, Mississippi, named Joe Biedenharn had decided, much to the chagrin of Coca-Cola corporate in Atlanta, to use their syrup to bottle Coca-Cola himself. Let’s continue with the story.

Larry Jorgenson (08:34):
For five years, Joe Biedenharn bottled Coca-Cola. Now, the only other place that was bottling Coca-Cola, about two years after Biedenharn started in Vicksburg, was a bottler in Valdosta, Georgia. So within five years of Coca-Cola being invented, there were only two places that were bottling it.

Well, from there, this is how Coca-Cola takes off. We have a young man from Chattanooga who is in the Spanish-American War in Cuba.

Larry Jorgenson (09:16):
His name was Ben Thomas. While he’s in Cuba, he enjoys a beverage over there called Fria Piña—cold pineapple—and it’s bottled. Well, he’s from Chattanooga and he remembers that when he was in Chattanooga, he used to get Coca-Cola at the counter and it was really good. He thought, “That’s it. When I get out of here, I’m going back to Chattanooga and we’re going to bottle Coca-Cola.”

So he goes back to Chattanooga and speaks with his friend Joseph Whitehead. They were both attorneys and they shared rooms in a boarding house there, and he presented his idea to him. He said, “We could be partners and do this.”

So they chase off to Atlanta, Georgia. They get down there and meet with Mr. Candler and say, “We want the rights to bottle Coca-Cola throughout the United States. We want the exclusive rights.”

Well, Candler thought, no. He said this: “I don’t want to do that. I’m worried that Coca-Cola will not have the same flavor in the bottle. I’m worried about the quality. To be honest about it, it’s a dumb idea, and I think bottling is a backstreet business.”

So, you know, he chased them away, and they persisted. And finally he said, “All right, I’ll tell you what. You go back to your hotel tonight and you draw up what you think would be a contract, and you bring it to me and I’ll look at it.”

So, while they’re lawyers, you know, they go back and they draw up a contract that gives them the exclusive rights to bottle Coca-Cola in the United States. The next day they go back and they meet with Mr. Candler and he looks at it and he said, “Well, you can’t have all of the United States, because Joe’s already doing it in Mississippi, so I can’t give you Mississippi.”

But he sold them the rights to bottle Coca-Cola exclusively throughout the United States for one dollar, and it was said that he never collected the dollar. He just wanted to get rid of them. And he told them when they left, “I still think it’s a dumb idea, and if it doesn’t work, I don’t want you to come crying back to me about it.”

So here they go. They go back to Chattanooga, the two of them. They now have the rights to bottle Coca-Cola throughout the United States. Nobody else can do it.

Well, between the two of them, they’ve got $1,500 and they have this project called “Bottle Coca-Cola for Everybody.” So they start a little bottling plant and they thought, “No, this isn’t going to work.” First of all, they weren’t real good at it, and the workers were wearing protective mesh over their faces because the bottles kept exploding, and they thought, “This is not going to work.”

Then the light goes on and they said, “Wait a minute, we’ve got the rights. Why don’t we start selling territories? That’s what we’ll do.”

So, you know, if you wanted to bottle Coca-Cola in Paducah, Kentucky, they would sell you a 50-mile territory in Paducah, Kentucky, and that would be your territory and you could set up your little bottling plant and sell Coca-Cola. And today, I think, we’d call that franchising.

The interesting thing—you may have paid $1,500 or whatever for that territory, but you also were required to use the Coca-Cola syrup, obviously, so you had to order syrup from Atlanta to make your Coca-Cola. Well, every time you ordered a gallon of syrup from Atlanta, the two attorneys that sold you your territory got a commission on you purchasing that syrup.

So they were gone but not forgotten, so to speak. And they ultimately, both of them, got very rich because of being able to sell the territory and keep the commission on the syrup that was being used in each territory. And that is how Coca-Cola took off.

All of a sudden, you’ve got young, ambitious businesspeople, entrepreneurs around the country that have scraped together enough money to buy a territory to bottle Coca-Cola. So they’re out working, bottling, selling it, promoting it, doing whatever they can to promote your product. And that’s what really made Coca-Cola grow rapidly in the United States.

Well, that certainly is growing a business from consumer demand and not the desire of the owner of the business.

And the interesting thing on all of that is that the Coca-Cola bottle as we know it didn’t really happen until about 1915. You know, these bottlers—okay, now they’ve got syrup and they’re going to make Coca-Cola. But what are you going to put it in?

So what happened is, there were any bottles they could get their hands on. And in the early days, you know why we hear it called “pop”? Because in the early days, one of the bottles they would get would have this rubber stopper on the top and when you opened it, it would go “pop.”

Well, because there was no standard bottle and bottles were whatever you could get your hands on, there also became a lot of knockoff products. People saw what was happening with Coca-Cola. So the next thing you’ve got, you know, Coca-Cola is spelled with two K’s, you’ve got Chero-Cola, you’ve got—there were probably sixty or seventy different people that at one time were making a cola beverage.

So consequently, the consumer that would see a bottle that said something about “cola” on it, they would presume it’s Coca-Cola and they would buy it. So finally the Coca-Cola Company said, “Wait a minute, we have got to do something about this.”

And legally they did go after a couple of companies that were using the term “cola,” but they decided the best plan was in marketing—to have their own bottle that was the only bottle that would represent Coca-Cola and could not be used by anybody else. It was a patented design.

What they did is they challenged the bottle manufacturers to a competition, and they said, “All right, bottle manufacturers, you produce the bottle. We’ll select one of them and that will be the bottle. It’ll be patented, and you will be allowed to produce that bottle for every Coca-Cola bottler in the United States.”

Well, the challenge was met by five bottle manufacturers, and in 1915, the five manufacturers each took what they thought should be the bottle to a Coca-Cola Bottlers’ Convention in Atlanta and presented the bottles.

Lee Habeeb (16:58):
And you’ve been listening to Larry Jorgenson tell the story of Coca-Cola’s rise. And by the way, to read his two books on the subject, The Coca-Cola Trail and Return to the Coca-Cola Trail, go to your local bookstore, or to Amazon, or the usual suspects—wherever you get your books. And what a story—about business, about competition, about franchising, about ingenuity and licensing. All of these business concepts helped propel ideas into the common culture and into common use, as Coca-Cola has managed to do in this great country.

When we come back, more of this remarkable business story, this culture story, here on Our American Stories.

[Break]

Lee Habeeb (18:10):
And we return to Our American Stories. When we last left off, Larry Jorgenson was telling us about how Coca-Cola corporate decided to have a contest among bottle makers to create a standardized bottle. This was because so many rip-off bottles existed. Let’s return to the story.

Larry Jorgenson(18:33):
Well, the challenge was met by five bottle manufacturers, and in 1915, the five manufacturers each took what they thought should be the bottle to a Coca-Cola Bottlers’ Convention in Atlanta and presented the bottles. Well, one was selected.

It was the bottle manufactured by the Root Glass Company of Terre Haute, Indiana, and it was, in fact, the design that we all recognize now as Coca-Cola. The interesting thing about the Coca-Cola bottle—if you look at the original bottle, it has, and did have for many, many years, a very light green tint to it.

And that, in fact, was the result of the sand. The Root Glass Company was getting its sand from a quarry about fifty miles away from Terre Haute, Indiana. Well, that sand had copper and some other minerals in it. So when the glass was blown using that sand, it would get a light green tint because of the minerals in the sand.

Coca-Cola was so pleased with that that they named it. First, they called it “German Green,” and that was going to be the color used in the bottle. Well, they thought twice about that and decided they would call it “Georgia Green.”

So as time went on and other bottle companies were given the rights to make the Coca-Cola bottle, Coca-Cola said to them, “If the sand you use in developing the bottle does not contain the minerals to create the green, you must add them.”

So it was something that happened by accident and something that became a part of the Coca-Cola bottle for decades. Now yes, you could go in the store and buy that little six-and-a-half-ounce bottle and it’s white, but for many, many decades, it was light green, and that’s the way Coca-Cola wanted it.

And I guess there’s another side story we need to tell, too. It’s not Coca-Cola—it’s Delta Airlines. Everybody says, “Well, how does that relate?” Well, I’ll tell you what: Coca-Cola money created Delta Airlines.

What happened was, it was the Biedenharn family—the family that were the first to ever bottle Coca-Cola in Vicksburg, Mississippi. They were doing well, and there were five brothers that were ambitious. They found a bottler in Monroe—Monroe, Louisiana, that is—and they bought that bottler. That became Coca-Cola Bottling Plant Number Two for the Biedenharns.

Well, that evolved. They continued to buy plants, they continued to grow, and every time they grew, another brother became a bottler. He went to whatever the next plant was. And at one time they were one of the top five independent bottlers in the United States.

And Joe Biedenharn’s son, Bernie Biedenharn, became sort of the leader of the pack, so to speak. He was the youngest son, and he got interested. There was a crop-dusting company in Monroe, Louisiana, which is where they were located. And the crop duster needed some help, wanted to buy some more planes. So Mr. Bernie Biedenharn loaned him some money, and in return he got some stock.

And this goes on and on—needs some more planes—and all of a sudden they decide, “We’re going to start hauling passengers besides spraying crops. We’ll start hauling passengers from Dallas, Texas, to Shreveport, to Monroe, to Georgia.” And so they started hauling passengers.

Well, it then became the Delta Airline Company based out of Monroe, Louisiana. And once again, Mr. Biedenharn was right there to help finance them and help them buy planes and make it all happen. And, in fact, for a long time, Monroe, Louisiana, was the corporate headquarters for Delta Airlines.

An interesting story is that at one point, when Delta had gotten pretty big, they were still located in Monroe as a corporate headquarters, and they were having their annual meeting of the board and the investors in Delta Airlines. They were having it in Monroe.

But at that point one of the investors from a big city—maybe Chicago, who knows where—stood up and said, “You know, I’m whoever I am, I’m Joe Smith, and I’m from Chicago, and our airline has gotten so big we should not be meeting in places like Monroe, Louisiana. We need to be meeting in bigger towns. I have five thousand shares of Delta Airlines, and I think, as an investor, we need to move on.”

And at that point Mr. Bernie Biedenharn, who was obviously an investor and attending the meetings, stood up and said, “I’m Bernie Biedenharn, and I have ninety-some thousand shares of Delta Airlines, and we’ll see you next year in Monroe.”

So it was an interesting story—how for a long time Coca-Cola money played a big role in what is now the giant Delta Airlines.

Montie Montgomery (24:27):
The Biedenharns would also get involved in baseball, with Ollie Biedenharn building the Biedenharn Stadium in Shreveport, Louisiana, in the 1920s. It was there that Ollie would pioneer something that we take for granted today.

Larry Jorgenson (24:39):
The baseball park was, in fact, the first park to have night lights, because he realized it gets pretty warm in summertime in Shreveport, but nighttime is a good time for baseball—it’s cooler. So they lit the ballpark, and they did amazing things in promoting people to come to the ballpark to have a Coca-Cola.

One of the most amazing things was old Babe Ruth came to town. And Coca-Cola Shreveport promoted him coming to town with his baseball team to play the Shreveport team, and it was a tremendous sellout. And old Babe got up there and slammed a couple home runs.

In fact, one of them he hit so hard it went out of the park and landed up through the window of a streetcar that was going by. It was just typical of what they would do.

And today, if you go to Shreveport, Louisiana, you’re going to find buildings, you’re going to find public hospitals—things that are named Biedenharn—because of what was done then at that time for the community, and obviously to promote the product. Let’s realize it: they were getting the word out about the product and Coca-Cola, as well as helping the community.

Randy Mayo, who is a great-grandson of Ollie Biedenharn, basically said that getting a Coca-Cola franchise was like getting the key to a gold mine. “I think Coca-Cola will always be here. One hundred years from now, it won’t be the Coca-Cola we know now, but it’ll be Coca-Cola owned and Coca-Cola promoted, and it’ll be equally as important a part of what a person enjoys as it is now. You know, I wish I could stick around for the next couple of generations to see where they go with it. And the bottlers that we write about can be thankful that they are Coca-Cola bottlers.”

Lee Habeeb (26:44):
And a terrific job on the production by Montie Montgomery, and a special thanks again to Larry Jorgenson. His two books, The Coca-Cola Trail and Return to the Coca-Cola Trail, are available at the usual suspects online or at your local bookstores.

A story so much about ingenuity being the key, and enterprise, and enterprising entrepreneurs—the story of Coca-Cola’s rise, here on Our American Stories.