Coca-Cola in a Bottle: One Dollar for All of It

Asa Candler invented nothing. He bought the formula for Coca-Cola in eighteen eighty-eight from its inventor, John Pemberton, and by eighteen ninety-two had built the Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta around the syrup. He sold it at soda fountains, in glasses mixed with carbonated water on the spot. Bottling, he believed, was a side business not worth his attention.

Two Chattanooga lawyers, Benjamin Thomas and Joseph Whitehead, saw it differently. In eighteen ninety-nine they traveled to Atlanta and proposed to Candler that they be granted exclusive rights to bottle Coca-Cola and sell it nationwide. Candler thought so little of the bottling business that he signed the contract, reportedly for consideration of one dollar. He never collected it.

Thomas and Whitehead returned to Chattanooga and established the first Coca-Cola bottling company. Their contract reportedly had no fixed end date and, critically, gave them the right to sub-contract the bottling rights to other companies. Within a few years they had franchised the operation across the country. What started in this city as a gentleman's handshake over a dollar became the architecture of an industry, the franchised bottling system that still supplies most of the soft drinks sold in the United States today.

Candler is said to have later regretted the deal. The Coca-Cola Company spent years in legal disputes over the terms of a contract that had been signed so casually. Meanwhile, Chattanooga had quietly and accidentally become the birthplace of the largest beverage distribution system ever built.