History of Coca-Cola | Secrets of Coca-Cola | Channel 5 #History

Atlanta capital of Georgia America the birthplace of coca-cola and home of its headquarters it's the world's largest beverage company employing over 700,000 worldwide it all started here in 1886 with a chemist called dr. John Pemberton Pemberton did have a product that was very successful called French wine of coca French wine of coca was one of those classic almost mystical patent medicines of the late 19th century and the people who profit it to you claimed that it would cure virtually every problem that you might have from neuralgia to headaches to upset stomachs mental fatigue and of course you've got a sexual problem it'll solve that as well because guess what it contained cocaine it started off as anything but soft we all think of it as a soft drink today but it cut quite a punch to it French wine of coca was a heady mix of Bordeaux red wine mixed with caffeine and coca leaf extract but at one dollar a bottle and tasting bitter it was a niche market he knew that he could make more money if he could sell a regular beverage at a soda fountain because patent medicines were sold a dollar a bottle why not sell something multiple drinks for five cents each Pemberton went about adapting the bitter tasting medicine in the back room of his pharmacy what you have to do is mask you with a big old pile of sugar which is what you find in a law soft drinks and energy drinks and to sell to adults and children alike he removed the alcohol no one thought that cocaine was a problem it wasn't deemed to be a terrible drug and it was it wasn't it was legal so he removed the alcohol but he kept the cocaine in the company has always denied that cocaine was in it if you look carefully at the statements as they say cocaine was never part of the formula for coca-cola which is perfectly accurate but the extract of coca leaves was part of the original formula land that is cocaine the formula was complete all it needed now was a name dr. Pemberton had an accountant who worked for him and his name was Frank Robinson and he's a hero of coca-cola and he does not get enough credit for what he did he invented the name and he just like the alliterative sound of coca and Kola we had coca leaf hence the coca and we had Kola nuts which was where the caffeine came from so Coca Cola and really importantly he came up with the beautiful coca-cola script that we all recognized as the company's logo so in a joint effort between John Pemberton and Frank Robinson Coca Cola was born but during the first year is any sold $50 worth of stock it was not a success right away and in fact dr. Pemberton died before he saw the business become a huge success he was actually on his deathbed and he ended up selling the business with the inventor on his deathbed coca-cola was about to be transformed by a new owner ASA canler within a very short period of time managed to corral the ownership and he's the one who made it a nationally successful software ASIC Adler acquired the company in 1891 and in the early days one of the his main objectives was to put their logo on almost everything it didn't matter any type of advertising they would engage it like all good capitalist ventures profit was at its core and Candler knew just how to grow the business fast ASIC handlers are the future by using not just a little advertising but mass advertising you know he poured you know in 1902 I think over $100,000 in advertising which is huge its enormous that's why you see coca-cola calendars coca-cola pocket mirrors coca-cola wallets he would have people paint the side of barns in the countryside you would make posters vending machines throughout the years there's a Salesman truck back here different forms of signage and so what he was trying to ingrain is this feeling of coca-cola with these images and people would instantly recognize it one of the earliest promotions of the coca-cola company introduced was the free drink coupons at this time the drink was sold in pharmacies from a soda fountain this is a place that people would have come to maybe after the theater or during the day had a beverage maybe even had something to eat while they were here so it was more of a gathering spot for people you'll see the soda jerk is right here serving you he would have put the syrup into the glass for you and then he would have turned and add carbonated water to you beverage there might be a hundred and twenty different options that you could order because all it was is soda water and different syrups the challenge was that nobody knew what a coke was so ASA Candler under wrote a sampling campaign so why we have here is the 1901 free drinking money you'll see on the back the classic coca-cola red and white with early script logo he would write to soda fountain operators and Assam could you please send me your top 50 customers and then he would get the addresses and he would send them coupons basic handler was confident he drank at one time and knew this is so good I'm gonna buy the whole company and he knew too if I can get people to try it one time even if it's for free there'll be customers for liable well the family lore is that is that ASIC handler would howl at the amount of coca-cola he was giving away for free he was a tight-fisted fellow but it paid off what was making fifty dollars a year in 1886 was now making over 11,000 times that by the turn of the century the business really prospered and by the end of the 1890s they were selling a quarter of a million gallons of syrup a year it was a capitalists dream but a scandal was emerging that could bring the entire company crashing down in the late part of the 19th century cocaine was seen as a revolutionary drug everybody was crazy about it they thought it was gonna be terrific but quickly at the turn of the century things really started going against cocaine there were cocaine scares around the country and that became a big problem for the company in 1903 the New York Tribune ran an expose that linked cocaine to crime all over America people were worried that it was addictive and that it could actually turn you into a criminal eventually you know having any cocaine and the product that was active like that was too much of a negative the Pure Food and Drug Administration came along and said any semblance any sign of this strain of cocaine you're gonna have to remove the problem was they believed they had to keep the coca in coca-cola to retain legal protection over the trademark so they developed a way to continue using the coca leaf but with the active cocaine removed over the years they refined a process for exhausting coca leaves percolated reynad nougat pasteurize it I thought it would be not only impossible for cocaine to survive that process but for anything to survive it about 1899 two lawyers came down from Chattanooga to visit a Sikandar one was Joseph Whitehead the other one was Benjamin Thomas and they were interested in acquiring the exclusive rights to bottle of coca-cola and at that time it had never been bottled before Candler didn't think much of the idea of bottling coca-cola because bottling was a really disreputable back alley business because the product went bad sometimes you would do it in a barn in the backyard and there be animals next door or there'd be straw on the ground he's like yeah okay I don't have really time for this and coca-cola is meant to be sold as syrup or it's soda fountains so if y'all want these rights here you go so remarkably he sold the contract for $1 to them what an opportunity to take what became the most important brand of the 20th century and have the exclusive rights to distributing it these two lawyers set about creating a national network of of coca-cola bottlers the problems with buckling had to be soaked this is the bottle that they first settled on this is the Hutchinson bottle and they were sealed by wire and rubber stopper and in order to break that seal you just bent the metal wire and it popped out and pop that's how it got the name pop the problem was you could not sanitize these bottles and so bottled soft drinks tended to go bad and people would get sick this could have ruined the bottling operation before it even began fortunately technological advances came in the nick of time the great stroke of good fortune that came to the early bottlers was a fellow in Baltimore named painter invented the bottle cap and so that's when they went to the straight sided bottle which you see here and these bottles could be properly sanitized coke bottle errs all across the country went from being back-alley belly wash salesman to being millionaires and it all happened virtually overnight people always say ISA was crazy for giving away the coca-cola bottling rights for a dollar I disagree I think that was actually one of the best things he ever did by 1910 just a decade later you had coca-cola bottling plants all across the country and they were selling oceans of coca-cola it's easy to see how back in the early 20th century there were other people who wanted to cash in on the unexpected success of the sugary brown liquid there were a lot of imitators who were imitating off of our name Africa a miracle alla Cola bowl Emma : Cafe de Ola carbo Cola candy Cola capicola Cheryl : I'm just through the seas so far it was an endless stream of imitators and everyone had you know different bottles and they were trying to look like Coke and Coke didn't even have the same problem some of them had the script at the bottom some in the middle some at the top so there was no consistency so what would happen is imitators took advantage of that here's a coca-cola glass and here's a celery Cola glass and the same thing happened with these amber colored bottles the bottles were so similar customers couldn't tell the difference especially when they couldn't even properly see the bottles for sale bottle soft drinks tended to be sold in huge tubs of dark iced water your consumer would put plunge an arm into these icy depths and come up with who knows what bottles of coca-cola so the bottlers were upset because they were losing business mr. canler was upset because he was losing business also and again the company is so smart and the marketing side they said wait a minute we have a chance to really stand out let's create our own unique bottle and in 1915 that coca-cola yes sir and that's the brand-new bottle for coca-cola that had to be recognizable in the dark or broken on the ground that was the creative brief for these glass companies they patterned after they have a skirt anywhere's but in India I'll take the humble set I'll take Betty this is the original this is the original drawing that was done so you can see they were very close to what they made this is a prototype of that bottle and you can see it's bulbous in the middle and a little narrow in the bottom and it is ribbed and veiny kind of like a cocoa pod but cocoa pod is the source of chocolate nothing to do with cocoa the cocaine leaf from which coca-cola got its name I mean what a great mistake they made because that beautiful shape was eventually thinned down to the iconic contour bottle that we all know today but the war threatened everything sugar was going to be rationed and restricted and they thought they might have to curtail sales by as much as half so they began with an audacious theory that they could argue that that coca-cola was in a central wartime product the chairman of coca-cola said that they would give bottles of coca-cola to the troops for a five cents a time and in court no matter what it costs the company and it was brilliant it lost money of course but but the company was able to associate itself with the war effort as a result the drink was made exempt from sugar rationing in the US and the company even saw an opportunity to expand overseas when Eisenhower went to the troops and said what can we do to boost morale and to get you through the war they asked for three things they asked for cigarettes they asked for candy and they asked for coca-cola so Eisenhower wrote a note to the company asking for mobile bottling plants and that's what happened in Italy Germany they used the Second World War to catapult themselves into places like Europe and the in the Pacific in Southeast Asia when when Coke became available to GIS it was it had by then become such a familiar part of American life that it was like a letter from home so soon after when the war ended we had all these mobile bottling plants that could be developed into permanent bottling plants so in some instances locals would take over the bottling plant people who were interested in getting a bottling contract would become the bottler in that country and in some instances GIS liked where they were where they were and decided to live there and took over the bottling [Music] you

Channel: Channel 5

Views: 144,623

Keywords: Channel 5, Channel 5 UK, My5, official channel 5, Watch Channel 5, Channel 5 TV, C5, 5 TV, my5UK, channel five, channelfive, cfive, myfive, official channel five, coca cola, secret formula, coca-cola zero (beverage), pepsi challenge, coca cola secrets, new coke, soft drink, coke history facts, coke history coca cola timeline, coke drunk history, coke cola history, coke logo history, coke company history, coca-cola, coca cola history, Pepsi history, coca cola drink, drink coke

Id: DwCGY5SfLA4

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 01 2020