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  • 1999-05-01 (xsd:date)
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  • Was Coca-Cola Carbonated by Accident? (en)
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  • I never cease to be amazed at how we seem to cherish legends over reality. A fine example has to do with the myth surrounding the invention of Coca-Cola: Many people still believe that Coca-Cola inventor Dr. John Pemberton's mixing of his syrup with soda water came about because an inattentive clerk at a drugstore soda fountain made a mistake. Frederick Allen lays this old chestnut to rest in Secret Formula, his history of Coca-Cola: One of the reasons for Pemberton's so hotly pursuing development of a new soft drink (yes, there were other soda water concoctions on the market at the time: Hires Root Beer in 1876 and Dr Pepper in 1885, as well as many others that aren't still around) was Atlanta and Fulton County's decision to go dry in 1885. Pemberton had been marketing French Wine Coca (a blatant ripoff of the highly successful Vin Mariani); because he could no longer use wine as the base, he looked around for something else to mix with his coca preparation. The various flavorants we associate with the taste of Coca-Cola were what he came up with to mask the unpalatable taste of coca and kola, and he planned from the beginning to use soda water as the new base. As Pendergrast writes: Seems pretty straightforward: The plan was always to mix the syrup with carbonated water, yet the accidental discovery legend has been passed off as truth in more than a few publications. For instance: Something seems to impel us to dismiss certain trivial inventions with lucky stiff explanations. Perhaps this is because we would like to believe that a moderate helping of good luck can make a success of anyone. Or maybe our need to find sense and order in our world requires us to denigrate fabulous fortunes built upon the simplest of discoveries (it's only a fizzy drink, after all) as being due to serendipity rather than design. We often fail to recognize all the hard work, planning, and painstaking trial-and-error effort that goes into these simple discoveries, however. Isn't it much more comforting to assure ourselves that a little bit of good fortune is all that separates us from the fabulously rich, people who were just like us until lady luck paid them a visit? (en)
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