John Pemberton's Remedy

John Stith Pemberton was a Columbus pharmacist who invented, in this city, the direct chemical ancestor of Coca-Cola. That sentence contains multitudes, so here is the fuller version.

Pemberton was born in Knoxville, Georgia, in eighteen thirty-one and trained as a physician and chemist. He served in the Confederate army, was wounded in the Battle of Columbus on April sixteenth, eighteen sixty-five, the same battle that ended the war for this city, and came out the other side addicted to morphine, as tens of thousands of Civil War veterans did. Morphine was the primary surgical analgesic of the era, issued freely and without guidance on dose or duration, and a significant portion of the men who passed through military hospitals in the eighteen sixties spent the rest of their lives chasing relief from the dependence those hospitals created.

Pemberton, who understood chemistry as well as anyone in the region, began experimenting. He was drawn to a French product, Angelo Mariani's wine of coca, which combined Bordeaux wine with an extract of coca leaves and had become wildly fashionable in Europe, endorsed by Pope Leo the Thirteenth and Queen Victoria among others. Pemberton created his own version: Pemberton's French Wine Coca, formulated in Columbus in eighteen eighty-five. It was an alcoholic tonic containing wine, coca leaf extract, and kola nut, marketed as a nerve tonic and headache remedy. It sold at his pharmacy and at druggists throughout the region.

Then Atlanta and Fulton County passed temperance legislation in eighteen eighty-six, restricting the sale of alcohol. Pemberton needed a non-alcoholic version. He removed the wine, adjusted the formula, added carbonated water by what accounts of the period describe as accident, and arrived at an early form of Coca-Cola. He moved to Atlanta, where the drink found its larger market. Asa Griggs Candler purchased the full rights for a few hundred dollars after Pemberton's health failed. Pemberton died of stomach cancer in eighteen eighty-eight, largely broke. Candler built one of the great fortunes of the American century on the formula Pemberton invented here on the Chattahoochee.