Nearly every soft drink on the shelf began as something else: a medicine, a temperance drink, a mixer for whiskey, a way to use up what the cheese factory threw out. The people behind them were pharmacists, bakers, watchmakers, and one stubborn Oregonian with a grudge against roadside litter. Here are thirty-six of their stories.
Every tile in a Soda and Soft Drinks game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Famous Brands
nine stories
1The drink customers ordered by the name of the town
On the tile: Dr Pepper1885
At Morrison's Old Corner Drug Store in Waco, Texas, a young pharmacist named Charles Alderton spent his spare hours mixing syrups behind the soda fountain. One combination of twenty-three flavors caught on so completely that regulars stopped describing it and simply asked him to shoot them a Waco. Wade Morrison, who owned the store, gave the drink a proper name and filed paperwork putting its birthday at December 1, 1885, months before the first Coca-Cola was poured in Atlanta.
2Coca-Cola sold its bottling rights for one dollar
On the tile: Bottling deal1899
In July 1899 two Chattanooga lawyers, Benjamin Thomas and Joseph Whitehead, asked Asa Candler for the right to put Coca-Cola in bottles. Candler believed the future of his drink belonged to the soda fountain, and he signed the rights away for one dollar. The company learned better soon enough. Beginning in the 1920s it started a long and expensive campaign to buy back the bottling franchises its president had handed over for pocket change.
Caleb Bradham ran a drugstore in New Bern, North Carolina, and it was his pleasure to mix soft drinks for the friends who gathered at his fountain. They named one of them Brad's Drink. In 1898, for reasons nobody has ever established, Bradham changed the name to Pepsi-Cola. The business prospered until after the First World War, when the rise and fall of the sugar market brought down the twenty-year-old company. The name kept going without him.
4A wartime soda built from other industries' leftovers
On the tile: FantaWorld War II
Cut off from Coca-Cola syrup by the war, Max Keith, who ran the company's German subsidiary, told his chemists to build a drink out of whatever rationing allowed: fruit shavings, apple fibers and pulp, beet sugar, and whey left over from cheesemaking. The writer Mark Pendergrast later described it as made from the leftovers of the leftovers. Keith asked his staff for a name, and a salesman named Joe Knipp offered Fanta, short for the German word for fantasy.
Vernors has been sold in Detroit since 1866, which makes it one of the oldest soft drinks in the country. The story goes that the pharmacist James Vernor mixed a ginger tonic, sealed it in an oak barrel when he left to serve in the Civil War in 1862, and found it turned into something better when he came home. The Detroit Historical Society also records a competing account from a family member: that Vernor worked out the formula only after the war.
6The soda Coca-Cola could not beat, so it bought in
On the tile: Inca Kola1935
A British family named Lindley settled in Peru and went into the drinks business there in 1910. Their bright gold Inca Kola reached the market in 1935, a year before Coca-Cola arrived in the country, and Peruvians never let go of it. In 1999 Coca-Cola paid two hundred million dollars for half of Inca Kola and the right to sell it abroad, while the Lindley company kept it at home. By 2012 the two were running neck and neck: 26 percent of the Peruvian market to Coca-Cola's 25.5.
In 1977 India's government told Coca-Cola to hand a majority stake in its Indian arm to local shareholders and to share its secret formula. The company left the country instead. Ramesh Chauhan's Parle group launched Thums Up into the gap that same year, and Indians made it their own. Coca-Cola returned in 1993 and bought Parle's soft drink business, Thums Up included. The cola it walked away from is now a billion-dollar brand and still the best-selling cola in India.
Sugar was scarce in 1917, and L. D. Peeler, a bottler in Salisbury, North Carolina, wanted a cola he could make with less of it. He kept experimenting until he landed on wild cherry flavoring over a cola base. The result came out burgundy in the glass and cherry on the tongue, and between them those two things supplied the name. Peeler and his fellow Salisbury investors bought their local branch out of a bankruptcy that year and called the new firm Carolina Beverage Corporation.
Glasgow Central Station was being rebuilt in 1901, and the steelworkers on the job were drinking beer to get through the heat and the dust. A local soft drinks maker, A. G. Barr, brought them a tonic-like alternative instead. That drink became Irn-Bru, still made to a secret recipe the company says blends thirty-two flavors. More than a century on, Barr will not say what the thirty-two are.
1The minister who carbonated water next to a brewery
On the tile: Priestley1770s
Joseph Priestley's house in Leeds stood beside a brewery, and the vats next door gave off a heavy air he could collect and study. He recognized it as the same gas that made certain spring waters effervescent, learned to generate it himself from chalk and sulfuric acid, and then worked out how to dissolve it into plain water. That made him the first person to produce carbonated water. The Royal Society gave him its top honor for the work in 1773.
2A watchmaker turned carbonated water into a business
On the tile: Schweppe1783
Johann Jacob Schweppe was a watchmaker and jeweler in Geneva with an amateur's appetite for chemistry. He built an apparatus that generated carbon dioxide from chalk and sulfuric acid and forced it into water under pressure, the first such machine to make practical use of a compressing pump. He set up in business with it in 1783. A partnership seven years later sent him on to start a factory in London, and the name has been on bottles ever since.
3A tonic, a bookkeeper, and a famous piece of handwriting
On the tile: Pemberton1886
John Pemberton was an Atlanta pharmacist, and what he made in the spring of 1886 he sold as a tonic for common ailments. The first glass went out at Jacobs' Pharmacy on May 8. His bookkeeper, Frank Robinson, suggested the name, thinking that the two Cs would look well in advertising, then wrote it out in an adaptation of the elaborate Spencerian script of the day. The others at Pemberton's company adopted his handwriting by unanimous consent.
Charles Hires, a Philadelphia pharmacist and a Quaker, worked up his own version of root tea, the traditional brew of roots, barks and berries, and sold it as a powder: twenty-five cents a packet, five gallons of drink. He named it root beer instead, reckoning that working men would reach for it, then headed off the obvious objection by advertising it as the temperance drink. At the 1876 Centennial Exhibition he gave glasses away and sold packets, and the business took off.
5The bottle cap that has barely changed since 1892
On the tile: Crown cap1892
The stoppers in use before 1892 did not seal a bottle well enough, so carbonated drinks leaked their gas on the shelf. William Painter's answer was a shallow metal cap with a corrugated flange and a cork disc inside, crimped over the lip so the pressure held it shut. He launched the Crown Cork and Seal Company the same year to make them. Since then the cap has traded its cork for plastic and lost three of its twenty-four teeth. That is about all.
Hiram Codd's bottle, patented in London in the early 1870s, had a glass marble loose in its neck. Filled upside down, the pressure of the drink pushed the marble against a rubber washer and held it there. To open one you pressed the marble down into a chamber molded into the neck, which caught it so the drink could pour past. The design had one flaw: children broke the empties to get at the marble. Codd's answer was to patent an oval one, less tempting to a child.
Joseph Whitehead was one of the two lawyers who bought Coca-Cola's bottling rights in 1899. When he died in 1906 his widow, Lettie Pate Whitehead, took over his share of the bottling business and his real estate interests, and ran both. In 1934 she was appointed to the board of directors of The Coca-Cola Company, one of the first women in America to sit on the board of a major corporation. She held the seat for nearly two decades.
Ben and Perry Feigenson came to Detroit from Russia as bakers. In November 1907 they founded a bottling works on Benton Street, handling mostly lager beer and soda water, and then did the thing only a baker would think of: they began flavoring the soda water with their cake frosting recipes. The first three flavors were fruit punch, grape and strawberry. In 1921 they renamed the pop Faygo, because the shorter name fit more easily on the bottle.
A hollow stalk of rye grass was the drinking straw of the day, and it went soft as it soaked. Marvin Stone wound strips of paper around a pencil, glued the seam, slid the pencil out, and had something better. He applied in May 1887 and received his patent for the artificial straw on January 3, 1888, the first patent for a drinking straw. By 1890 his factory was producing them in quantity, and the paper straw followed sodas and milkshakes across the country.
Quinine comes from the bark of the cinchona tree and treats malaria, which is why British soldiers posted to India took it dissolved in water. It is punishingly bitter, so they added gin. What survives of that arrangement is tonic water, which still carries a little quinine. Put a glass of it under an ultraviolet lamp and it fluoresces a vivid blue, the quinine absorbing light your eyes cannot see and handing it back as light they can.
Sassafras gave root beer its name and its flavor. Then laboratory animals fed safrole, the oil that makes up about eighty percent of oil of sassafras, developed liver cancer. On an order published in the Federal Register on December 3, 1960, the Food and Drug Administration deemed any food with added safrole or oil of sassafras adulterated. Root beer did not disappear. It has simply been made with substitutes ever since, including sassafras extract with the safrole taken out.
Ask around and somebody will tell you Dr Pepper is made with prune juice. It is not, and by the Dr Pepper Museum's account it never was. The museum traces the rumor to a remark the comedian Bob Hope made on a visit to the Waco area, which is a thin thread for something people have been repeating for generations. The recipe's twenty-three flavors are still unlisted. Prune simply is not one of them.
Harvey Wiley, the government's chief chemist, had declared that soft drinks containing caffeine were habit-forming and nerve-racking, and in 1909 he brought a case. Because the suit ran against the goods rather than the company, it carried the name United States v. Forty Barrels and Twenty Kegs of Coca-Cola. The defense hired a psychologist, Harry Hollingworth, whose forty-day study of sixteen people produced sixty-four thousand data points. The judge dismissed the case in 1911. The Supreme Court revived it in 1916, and Coca-Cola halved its caffeine.
On April 23, 1985, Coca-Cola replaced its formula with one that had beaten the old recipe in taste tests of nearly two hundred thousand people. The tests were right about the sip and wrong about everything else. By June the consumer hotline was taking fifteen hundred calls a day against four hundred before the change, and one letter arrived at headquarters addressed to Chief Dodo. The original came back on July 11, seventy-nine days after it left.
The standard egg cream contains no egg and no cream. It is milk, seltzer and chocolate syrup, worked up into a white head, which makes it essentially carbonated chocolate milk with foam on top. The drink came out of the crowded Jewish neighborhoods of the Lower East Side and Brooklyn. Louis Auster, the immigrant usually credited with creating it, reported selling three thousand a day in the 1920s and 1930s.
Augustin Thompson, a Maine-born doctor practicing in Lowell, Massachusetts, invented Moxie Nerve Food in 1876 as a syrup for, among other things, exhaustion caused by nervousness or heat of summer. Its key ingredient was gentian root, a bitter that still defines the taste. Carbonation arrived in 1885. In 1906 the company dropped nerve food from the name, after federal law caught up with health claims. Maine made Moxie its official state soft drink in 2005.
Hyman Kirsch ran a soda company in Brooklyn and was involved with the Jewish Sanitarium for Chronic Disease, where patients with diabetes and heart trouble could not have sugar. In 1952 he and his son Morris used calcium cyclamate to build those patients a sugar-free drink, in ginger ale and black cherry, and called it No-Cal. It was meant for the wards. Within a year it was selling five to six million dollars' worth to everybody else.
9The West African seed that named a whole category
On the tile: Kola nut
Kola nuts are the fruit of a tree indigenous to West Africa, where they remain part of local tradition and are shared as tokens of respect and good fortune. They hold at least twice the caffeine of coffee beans, and have long been taken to fight fatigue and sharpen alertness, to help digestion and to quiet a cough. When nineteenth-century pharmacists went hunting for a stimulant to put in a soda, this is what they reached for, and it is where the cola in a drink's name comes from.
American drugstore counters in the 1930s had a vocabulary of their own, and a professor named Harold Bentley spent 1934 and 1935 traveling around collecting it. Belch water meant seltzer. Cat's eyes meant tapioca. Fifty-five was root beer, maiden's delight was cherries, and an order of liver and onions went back to the kitchen as put out the lights and cry. Bentley credited the men behind the counters with a refreshing aptness.
The Volstead Act took effect in 1920 and nearly emptied the American alcohol trade. What replaced the saloon, in a great many towns, was the counter at the back of the drugstore. By 1922 The New York Times put the number of soda fountains in the country at more than a hundred thousand, most of them in drugstores, doing a billion dollars of business. Ice cream consumption rose an estimated forty percent across the decade.
3The root beer float's origin story does not check out
On the tile: Black Cow1893Myth busted
Colorado tells it this way: in 1893 a Cripple Creek man named Frank Wisner looked at the snow on Cow Mountain, thought of ice cream floating in soda, and invented the root beer float, which he called the Black Cow. Rachael Storm, a curator at History Colorado, went looking for the evidence and found none. Census data places Wisner in Chicago in 1900, and a newspaper has him gone east from Cripple Creek as early as 1888. Storm calls the story not a lie, but a myth.
The Harvard Dialect Survey asked more than ten thousand Americans for their generic term for a sweetened carbonated beverage. Soda took 52.97 percent of the answers, pop 25.08 and coke 12.38, with soft drink at 5.89. In much of the South, coke does the work of all of them, so a waitress may reasonably ask what kind. Tonic, which came in under one percent nationally, still turns up in eastern Massachusetts.
It is often said that Santa Claus wears red because red is Coca-Cola's color. The company says otherwise on its own history pages: Santa appeared in a red coat before Haddon Sundblom ever painted him. Thomas Nast drew his first Santa for the Harper's Weekly issue of January 3, 1863, in a star-spangled jacket and striped trousers, then kept at it for thirty years, shifting the coat from tan to red. Sundblom's Santa debuted in Coke ads in 1931, in The Saturday Evening Post, and he painted the character until 1964.
6They went to the library and came back with a bottle
On the tile: Contour bottle1915
In 1915 Coca-Cola asked glass companies for a bottle so distinct you could recognize it by feel in the dark, or lying broken on the ground. At the Root Glass Company in Terre Haute, Indiana, the shop foreman sent two of his men to the local library to look for ideas. They came back with an illustration of a cocoa bean, elongated and distinctly ribbed. Earl Dean sketched the shape on heavy linen paper, sample bottles were struck, and the design won.
The computer science department at Carnegie Mellon had one beloved Coke machine and a building that kept growing, so people were walking down to the third floor only to find the machine empty, or the bottles still warm. Someone wired micro-switches into its six columns of bottles and connected them to CMUA, the department's PDP-10, which then tracked how long each bottle had been cooling. The finger server was modified so anyone on the network could ask it.
The problem with carbonated drinks in weightlessness is keeping the cola fizzy without letting it spew out of the can. Coca-Cola designed a container to manage it, Pepsi built one of its own, and both flew on shuttle mission STS 51-F in the summer of 1985 for the crew to evaluate. The Smithsonian keeps one of the Coca-Cola cans in its collection. Neither drink ever made it onto the regular shuttle menu.
Richard Chambers hated the litter he found while hiking, read in 1968 that British Columbia had started a deposit system, and wrote to his state representative about it. Their first bill died in 1969. Governor Tom McCall then took the cause up himself, pledging to put a price on the head of every beer can and pop bottle in the United States. The 1971 Beverage Container Act passed, the first bottle bill in the country. Oregon's deposit is ten cents today.