David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…So then prohibition hits. Party’s over. Yup. Fall of 1885. Atlanta, I think might have been the first major city in America that institutes prohibition and becomes a dry town, no alcohol. Pemberton’s now like, well shoot, I’ve got this hit product. I need to scramble and come up with a soft version of a soft drink. And this is the origin of soft drinks. They’re not hard as in alcoholic drinks. They’re soft. There you go. He starts madly experimenting with all sorts of flavors and ingredients. After six months or so in April of 1886, he nails a formula. The question is, how does he arrive at this formula? The book I was reading, which is called Secret Formula—it’s a great book on the history of Coca-Cola that had access to all the corporate archives—really describes Pemberton in this phase as finding his capitalist streak, as realizing, okay, take a step back. Patent medicines are sold for 75¢ a dollar. It serves a crowd of people when they’re looking to recover from some ailment, or really at this point, probably serve an addiction.…

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