Background
Pemberton was born on August 16, 1888, in Knoxville, Georgia, the son of James C. Pemberton and Martha L. Gant. He spent most of his childhood in Rome, Georgia.
The Atlanta newspapers called him "the oldest druggist of Atlanta and one of her best known citizens."
Pemberton was born on August 16, 1888, in Knoxville, Georgia, the son of James C. Pemberton and Martha L. Gant. He spent most of his childhood in Rome, Georgia.
Pemberton entered the Reform Medical College of Georgia in Macon, and in 1850, at the age of nineteen, he was licensed to practice pharmacy. His main talent was chemistry.
During the American Civil War, he served in the Third Cavalry Battalion of the Georgia State Guard, which was at that time a component of the Confederate army. He achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel.
In April 1865, Pemberton sustained a saber wound to the chest during the Battle of Columbus. He soon became addicted to the morphine used to ease his pain. He was a pharmacist and as such searched for a cure to counteract this addiction. He began experimenting with coca and coca wines, eventually creating his own version of Vin Mariani, containing kola nut and damiana, which he called Pemberton's French Wine Coca.
In 1886, when Atlanta and Fulton County enacted temperance legislation, Pemberton had to produce a non-alcoholic alternative to his French Wine Coca. Pemberton relied on Atlanta druggist Willis Venable to test and help him perfect the recipe for the nonalcoholic variant of a beverage, which he formulated by trial and error. He worked out a set of directions for its preparation. He blended the base syrup with carbonated water by accident when trying to make another glassful of the beverage. Pemberton decided then to sell it as a fountain drink rather than a medicine. Frank Mason Robinson came up with the name "Coca-Cola" for the alliterative sound, which was popular among other wine medicines of the time. Although the name refers to the two main ingredients, because of controversy over its cocaine content, The Coca-Cola Company later said that the name was "meaningless but fanciful." Robinson hand wrote the Spencerian script on the bottles and ads. Pemberton made many health claims for his product, touting it as a "valuable brain tonic" that would cure headaches, relieve exhaustion, and calm nerves, and marketed it as "delicious, refreshing, pure joy, exhilarating," and "invigorating."
Soon after Coca-Cola hit the market, Pemberton fell ill and nearly bankrupt. Sick and desperate, he began selling rights to his formula to his business partners in Atlanta. Part of his motivation to sell was that he still suffered from an expensive continuing morphine addiction.
Pemberton died from stomach cancer at age 57 in August 1888. At the time of his death, he also suffered from poverty and addiction to morphine. His body was returned to Columbus, Georgia, where he was buried at Linwood Cemetery.
Pemberton is best known as the inventor of the recipe for Coca-Cola. In May 1886, he developed an early version of a beverage that would later become world-famous as Coca-Cola, but sold his rights to the drink shortly before his death.
In 2010, the Coca-Cola Company paid tribute to him as a key character within an advertising campaign called "Secret Formula." Centered on the secret ingredients of Coca-Cola, imagery related to Pemberton was used to make people more aware of Coke’s history and mythology.
Shortly after graduation, Pemberton met Ann Eliza Clifford Lewis of Columbus, Georgia, known to her friends as "Cliff," who had been a student at the Wesleyan College in Macon. They were married in Columbus in 1853. Their only child, Charles Ney Pemberton, was born in 1854. They lived in the Pemberton House in Columbus.
