Coca Cola Corporation was an

Atlanta, Georgia Atlanta ( ) is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Georgia. It is the seat of Fulton County, the most populous county in Georgia, but its territory falls in both Fulton and DeKalb counties. With a population of 498,715 ...

company, the first large-scale manufacturer and marketer of beverages based on the

Coca-Cola Coca-Cola, or Coke, is a carbonated soft drink manufactured by the Coca-Cola Company. Originally marketed as a temperance drink and intended as a patent medicine, it was invented in the late 19th century by John Stith Pemberton in Atlanta ...

formula, and closely related to

The Coca-Cola Company The Coca-Cola Company is an American multinational beverage corporation founded in 1892, best known as the producer of Coca-Cola. The Coca-Cola Company also manufactures, sells, and markets other non-alcoholic beverage concentrates and syrups, ...

, the corporation that took on that role by 1900 and became a worldwide business. After

Asa Candler Asa Griggs Candler (December 30, 1851 – March 12, 1929) was an American business tycoon and politician who in 1888 purchased the Coca-Cola recipe for $238.98 from chemist John Stith Pemberton in Atlanta, Georgia. Candler founded The Coca-Co ...

purchased the formula in 1899 from its developer, druggist

John Pemberton John Stith Pemberton (July 8, 1831 – August 16, 1888) was an American pharmacist and Confederate States Army veteran who is best known as the inventor of Coca-Cola. In May 1886, he developed an early version of a beverage that would later bec ...

, the latter's alcoholic son Charley Pemberton returned from

Louisville, Kentucky Louisville ( , , ) is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Kentucky and the 28th most-populous city in the United States. Louisville is the historical seat and, since 2003, the nominal seat of Jefferson County, on the Indiana border ...

the next year. He claimed his father had promised him the rights to the formula. The father corroborated this, and the incorporation proceeded with the younger Pemberton joining Candler and Woolfolk Walker as the principals. With Candler and Walker soon at odds with Charley Pemberton, his father announced that it was the rights to the Coca-Cola ''name'' but not the formula that he had conveyed to the son. Though he remained a shareholder in Coca Cola Corporation, the son left the company in the summer of 1888, and began selling a lower-quality version of the beverage, under the name Coca-Cola. Fearing this would erode the value of that name, the corporation renamed its product as Yum Yum and then as Koke, with poor success. Candler decided by 1894 to focus on the name and formula, and abandoned the troubled corporation, starting, without its other principals, a new corporation, The Coca-Cola Company. In the same year, Charley Pemberton died at the age of forty, after an apparent overdose of

opium Opium (or poppy tears, scientific name: ''Lachryma papaveris'') is dried latex obtained from the seed capsules of the opium poppy ''Papaver somniferum''. Approximately 12 percent of opium is made up of the analgesic alkaloid morphine, which i ...

, as he was probably addicted to it like his father. The Coca-Cola Company remained vulnerable, until the inactive Coca Cola Corporation's charter expired in 1908, to legal challenges from it.

References

* Pendergrast, Mark: ''For God, Country, and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It''. New York: Basic Books, 2000 (second edition; {{ISBN, 0-465-05468-4). Coca-Cola Food and drink companies based in Atlanta Manufacturing companies based in Atlanta Defunct manufacturing companies based in Georgia (U.S. state)