Let me start by saying that I wasn’t raised drinking Coca-Cola like some of my friends. I wasn’t raised on Pepsi either. We didn’t have soda at our house very often. We usually drank milk, juice and water. When I did get a soda, it was usually root beer since I thought that cola was too bitter. To this day, I’ll drink Dr. Pepper or Mr. Pibb before I’d touch the taint of cola. But even with my basic dislike of Coke, I had go to the World of Coca-Cola museum when I visited Atlanta. You may wonder why I would want to go to this three story glass, steel and neon altar to carbonated, brown sugar water? Why would I subject myself to hours of insipid advertising? Why would I plunge myself into one of the most tourist-ridden pits Atlanta has to offer? And finally, why would I drag two friends along, paying $4.50 for each for our admissions?
The answer is quite simple. I was looking to see how a singular soft drink - one bubbly beverage - a soda pop could wield so damned much power on this planet. How could this sickly sweet fizzy formula permeate almost every facet of our human existence? What was this nectar that we, like frantic bees, clammer to consume en masse everyday of our lives? I wanted to see the world through Coke bottle glasses. I hoped to gain all this insight. Also I was told that I could drink all the Coke I could stomach.
The Brochure
Welcome to The World of Coca-Cola! You are about to experience a tribute to a unique product and the consumers who have made it the world’s favorite soft drink. You’ll have the opportunity to discover the important place Coca-Cola occupies in the hearts of the world’s consumers, to follow the soft drink as it has grown over the years and to why it has become the world’s most widely recognized consumer product.
We hope you will get the same wonderful feeling of enjoyment and satisfaction that you get from an ice cold Coca-Cola. Enjoy!
Creating a Classic
After the elevator transports you to the third floor, you will encounter The Bottling Fantasy, a kinetic sculpture that blends reality and illusion to illustrate the bottling process and create the fanciful sights and sounds of any imaginary bottling plant.
At first glance, “The Bottling Fantasy” was really awesome. It looked as if the sculpture was filling bottles with Coca-Cola, capping them and moving them around by conveyers above our heads. Closer examination revealed a pretty shoddy work of art. It was a sham done with mirrors and fake bottles with false bottoms. This sculpture was the first thing we saw in the “Creating a Classic” gallery. I should have taken its lack of factual content about the Coke bottling process as an omen of what was about to come.
View a short film, “First Things First,” a brief history of the world… of Coca-Cola. See the development of Coca-Cola, a simple soda fountain idea, grow into a truly global product and Company. We have utilized our advertising to trace the history of Coca-Cola chronologically beginning in 1886 with Dr. John Styth Pemberton, the chemist credited with developing the still secret formula and Asa Griggs Candler, the Atlanta marketer who made sure Coca-Cola became a household name.
Large glass-enclosed display cases housed Coca-Cola advertising and memorabilia. Each case represented a time period and had a large placard that explained some element of the history. One of the main reasons I came to this museum was to see how Coca-Cola was going to deal with their history. How were the PR spin wizards going to explain that one of the main ingredients in the original soft drink was cocaine? None of the display case placards nor the short film mentioned cocaine. I was able to see “coca leaves extract” mentioned in some of the early advertising, but that was only after I really looked for it. The placard explained that the name “Coca-Cola” mimicked the style of products that was popular in those day. “First Things First” ignored the topic completely by offering a series of reenactments of events from early Coca-Cola history, including the design of the Coca-Cola script trademark. The actual contents of the beverage seemed secondary to the stylish trademark of Coca-Cola. The brochure seemed to back me up.
Enjoy the serving trays that featured vaudeville stars such as soprano Hilda Clark, the change receivers and colorful festoons that were once used in soda fountains and the illustrated calendars that became so familiar to millions of people. Graceful Tiffany-style lamps, decorative syrup dispensers, wallets, watch fobs and tiny pocket mirrors will give you a glimpse of times past.
Display case after display case was filled with objects bearing the Coca-Cola trademark. There were beautiful paintings of beautiful people with a bottle or glass of Coca-Cola and elaborate glass lamps with the trademark stuck inside. What the World of Coca-Cola displayed was not a history of the drink itself, but how a company skillfully installed the concept of the Coca-Cola into our lives. The whole museum was an advertisement. Duh! you may exclaim, what else would it be? Why would Coca-Cola muddle a perfect marketing scheme with the niggly details of facts? I quickly resigned myself to this realization..
As you leave this first gallery, pause on the atrium bridge, step inside a giant Coca-Cola can to experience Part One of the interactive Take Five videos. Make your selection by touching the screen to activate a videodisc showing five-year segments of world events and life-styles from 1886 to 1940, interwoven with the history of Coca-Cola and The Coca-Cola Company.
Actually it was the other way around; the history of Coca-Cola interwoven with world events and life styles. The videos were one early Twentieth Century cliché after another — you name it, pole sitting, flappers, prohibition, the Great Depression. It was like watching one of those crappy 70s time travel television shows. I guess, if Coca-Cola wasn’t going to get their history right, why should they bother with the world’s history. I was sure that there was a rich history behind The Coca-Cola Corporation. A little digging recently proved me right (See below).
The Pause That Refreshes
As you move into the second exhibition gallery, the period spanning the mid-1920s to the 1950s comes to life. At the late 1930s Barnes Soda Fountain, an old-fashioned soda jerk will answer your questions and demonstrate how an early Coca-Cola was prepared.
By the time I got to this gallery, I had given up my cynical attitude. I had originally planned on confronting the soda jerk with the “cocaine as ingredient” question, but I had been beaten down by the endless barrage of marketing. Anyway the soda jerk was some poor guy who was trying to answer obvious questions by hyper wide-eyed kids and their Hard Rock Café t-shirted parents. I was the anomaly. Asking the cocaine question seemed so pointless. I looked at the displays of Coca-Cola propaganda during the two World Wars. My eyes were glazed and uncritical. It made sense that Eisenhower would demand that eight Coca-Cola bottling factories be built for the U.S. troops in Africa. I could totally understand why the Coca-Cola Corporation fought so hard in court to say that “Coke”, the slang term for the drink from its cocaine days, was also their trademark. I was drowning in a sea of fizzy “feel good”.
Everyday… Everywhere
The world comes into focus during a 10 minute celebration of life and Coca-Cola around the globe. The movie “Every Day of Your Life,” filmed 17 countries, is shown on the first installation of large-screen High-Definition Video in the U.S. and features StereoSurround sound.
At the entrance to the theatre, discover fascinating Fabulous Facts on an electronic display, such as… “If all the Coca-Cola ever produced was placed in 6 ½ ounce bottles laid end-to-end, they would stretch to the moon and back 1,045 times,” … and see the total number of soft drinks served since 1886 by The Coca-Cola Company increase before your eyes… over nine thousand six hundred per second!!
Here is where all the facts about Coca-Cola were to be found. They all dealt with the immense popularity and mass consumption of the drink. I learned that Coke is sold in more than 195 countries more than 600 million times a day. As each fact was flashed on the display, I would giggle. One of the greatest achievements of the human history, landing on the moon, was overshadowed by the fact that we could just stack all the Coke bottles ever sold to make the journey more than a thousand times.
My two friends saw me transform from a jubilant cynic to a dismal zombie to a giggly fiend. They couldn’t understand why I would laugh so hard at each Coke fact. Couldn’t they see the absurdity of all of this, I thought.
By the time we entered the theatre, they I thought I had flipped out. We sat and as the lights dimmed I said to myself, “It’s not enough that Coke wants us to buy their products; they want to be a part of our lives — every day of it.”
As my friends watched the film “Every Day of Your Life,” they soon understood why I was laughing so hard. The movie showed Coca-Cola bottlers all over the world. Different cultures in different ceremonial dress were all drinking Coke. Bottles of Coke were being taken by pack animals to remote villages. It was ludicrous. We all left the film with the knowledge that Coca-Cola may have started as an American obsession, but it had spread worldwide like a pestilence.
We walked into the next gallery, The Real Thing, which was filled with advertising from the late 40s to the present. This included a mini-theatre that where all the Coke television commercials were being shown. It was hard to find a seat as this proved to be one of the most popular parts of the museum. People sat attentively and absorbed the nostalgic advertising. This era was when Coca-Cola was directly competing with Pepsi The slogan The Real Thing addressed this competition: Coke is the real thing that Pepsi is imitating. Pepsi and Coca-Cola aggressively tried to out-market each other spending millions of dollars to win our hearts and minds. It was later that I discovered the hidden political power struggles that took place (see below).
I had noticed before that Coca-Cola’s success didn’t seem related to the actual drink itself and one display seemed to support this. The display talked about the introduction of new Coke and the public outcry against it. I remembered that Coca-Cola did this to compete with Pepsi’s sweeter taste. Coke was still outselling Pepsi, but taste-tests had shown that people preferred the taste of Pepsi. So Coca-Cola learned a hard lesson, but they still won in the end. ABC News actually interrupted their daytime programming to announce that Coke was changing back to the old formula. Some people I knew thought that Coca-Cola had planned this all along as a publicity stunt. I think it was a well-conceived, test-marketed fuck up (The 80s were littered with them).
Before I left this gallery and filled my gullet with over-carbonated Coke products at Club Coca Cola and sample the more exotic Coke products from other countries at Tastes of the World, I paused. It wasn’t a pause that refreshes, but it was still Coke inspired. It was one of deep realization. I saw a carefully engineered piece of equipment in a display case. It looked like a modified soda fountain with a complex nozzle attachment. It was the “Space Dispenser”, an experimental module that dispensed Coke on the space shuttle Discovery. I realized then that now wherever there is human civilization, there will be Coca-Cola. No longer does Coca-Cola need to convince us that we need to “Enjoy Coca-Cola” (not “Drink” or “Buy”, but “Enjoy”). Their new slogan “Always Coca-Cola” rings so true. It is omnipresent.
I realize all of these things and I’m a little sad. We will probably never shake this naughty habit.
You may read this and think I’m an obsessive nut. It’s just brown sugar water, you think. What’s the big deal?!?
I say, exactly.
But don’t just take my word for it. See it for yourself…
Regular hours: 10 a.m.-8:30 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays; Noon-5 p.m. Sundays (tickets sold until one hour before closing). $4.50; $3.50 age 55 and older; $2.75 ages 6-12; under 6 free with adult. Discounts available for group tours (at least 25 people). Reservations are accepted only for groups of 25 or more. 55 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive at Central Avenue, next to Underground Atlanta. 404-676-5151.
What World Of Coke neglected to mention…
Here are some choice sips from the very flavorful history of Coca-Cola. I recommend two books for the complete unauthorized history: The Cola Wars by J.C. Louis and Harzell Yazijian (Everest House, 1980) and For, God, Country And Coca-Cola by Mark Pendergrast (1993). I also consulted No Time Lost by Walter Mack—a Pepsi founding executive(1982)
In 1886, John Pemberton desperately worked on a drink syrup formula. His previous concoction, “French Coca Wine”, was a bordeaux wine laced with coca, a poor ripoff of the widely successful, “Vin Mariani”. Given the success of Hires Root Beer in 1876 and Dr. Pepper in 1885 and the looming temperance movement to ban alcohol in Fulton County, Pemberton mixed coca extract with the kola nut, a reputed hangover cure brought to the US by African slaves. It took Pemberton six months to find a suitable syrup that wasn’t bitter. Coca-Cola was first marketed as a medicine.
By 1887, the slow progress of his new medicine/temperance drink and his failing health led Pemberton to sell his business to his partners for $283.24. He died penniless and was buried in an unmarked grave.
Bad publicity about the dangers of cocaine and an article in the New York Tribune in 1903 calling for legal action against Coca-Cola for distributing a cocaine based product forces Coca-Cola to change its recipe. The formula now uses spent coca leaves (leftover from the cocaine-making process). To this day they acquire the spent coca leaves from Stepan Chemical Co. in NJ, the only legal importer of coca leaves in the US.
Coca-Cola managed to establish a considerable market in Germany by the 1936 Olympic Games. When war erupted, Coke continued quench Nazi thirsts. Max Keith, the head of Coca-Cola German operations, had himself named “official administrator of soft-drink production” by the Office of Enemy Propaganda and was able to have the syrup smuggled into the country. During syrup shortages, he created his own formula, Fanta. He moved bottling from the air-raid prone cities to the countryside where electricity and pure water were abundant. He would often trade Coke bottles filled with fresh water to bombed cities to keep his delivery trucks from being seized. Coca-Cola and Fanta sales never really dropped and maintained a reasonable profit margin during the entire war even though a German competitor labeled the company as Jewish-owned and there was a constant threat of severe penalty for sugar hoarding. Toward the end of the war, Keith was to be interrogated; his company’s assets were to be seized and he was to be shipped to a concentration camp. The Germans assigned two separate officers to interrogate Keith. Each met with sudden death less than 24 hours before they were to confront the Coca-Cola executive. Keith was liberated by the Marines in 1945.
On the homefront, Coca-Cola was waging a different war —against Pepsi. First, they published a pamphlet entitled, “Importance of the Rest-Pause in Maximum War Effort”. This booklet reprinted letters from civilian war workers who suggested that they just couldn’t work without Coke. In 1941, the United States government passed laws for rationing sugar. Ed Forio, a former Coca-Cola vice president, was the main instigator behind the ration which mandated that companies would only be allowed 80% of their 1941 sugar consumption per a year. For Pepsi, which was just beginning to compete nationally against Coke, this was disastrous. They had to set up bottlers in Mexico, who wouldn’t allow sugar export, but would allow export of Pepsi. Coca-Cola, of course, complained even though they had plenty of exported sugar. As the war drew to a close, Senator Joseph McCarthy crusaded for the end of the sugar ration. It ended six months early in October 1947. Later a Senate investigation of McCarthy brought to light some influence peddling including a $20,000 “loan” from a Pepsi executive. Capitol Hill nicknamed McCarthy the “Pepsi-Cola Kid”.
After World War II, many women (especially teenage girls) were rumored to be using Coca-Cola as a postcoital contraceptive douche. In 1985, some researchers at the Harvard School of Medicine investigated Coke’s sperm killing abilities. Published in the November 1985 New England Journal of Medicine, the findings were as suspected. Douching of any kind is not an effective means of birth control (in fact, it may increase the risk of pregnancy). However Coca-Cola did kill sperm with Diet Coke being the most lethal. New Coke was the least effective only killing one-fifth the sperm that Classic Coke did.
Jimmy Carter, known as a Coca-Cola president (Pepsi supported Ford), shocked many Coke executives when he announced the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in the Soviet Union. Coca-Cola was hoping to squelch Pepsi’s popularity in Russia by securing the title of “official soft drink’ of the Games. They had printed up special Olympic cans, mounted a major ad campaign and had started a school in Moscow to teach 500 vendors how to sell Coca-Cola. Reluctantly, Coke supported the boycott and said they would stop Olympic shipments of their product. Of course, Coke was still sold at the Games because “considerable quantities” of the syrup had been sent before the boycott.
Coca-Cola is rumored to be able to dissolve everything from rusty nails to slabs of meat. In 1951, the Navy, concerned by the amount of Coca-Cola being bought by recruits, investigated its harmful effects. “We put human teeth in a cola beverage and found they softened and started to dissolve within a short period.” a doctor noted at a congressional hearing. “Phosphoric acid would dissolve iron or limestone … it would erode the steps [of the Capitol] coming up here … Try it.”
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