单项选择题
| The man who invented Coca-Cola was not
a native Atlantan, but on the day of his funeral every drugstore in town
testimonially shut up shop. He was John Styth Pemberton, born in 1831 in
Knoxville, Georgia, eighty miles away. Sometimes known as Doctor, Pemberton was
a pharmacist who, during the Civil War, led a cavalry troop under General Joe
Wheeler. He settled in Atlanta in 1869, and soon began brewing such patent
medicines as Triplex Liver Pills and Globe of Flower Cough Syrup. In 1885, he
registered a trade- mark for something called French Wine Coca Ideal Nerve and
Tonic Stimulant; a few months later be formed the Pemberton Chemical Company and
recruited the services of a bookkeeper named Frank M. Robinson, who not only had
a good head for figures but, attached to it, so exceptional a nose that he could
audit the composition of a batch of syrup merely by sniffling it. In 1886--year
in which, as contemporary Coca-Cola officials like to point out, Conan Doyle
unveiled Sherlock Holmes and France unveiled the Statue of Liberty-Pemberton
unveiled a syrup that he called Coca-Cola. It Was a modification of his French
Wine Coca. He had taken out the wine and added a pinch of caffeine, and, when
the end product tasted awful, had thrown in some extract of cola nut and a few
other oils, blending the mixture in a three-legged iron pot in his back yard and
swishing it around with an oar. He distributed it to soda fountains in used beer
bottles, and Robinson, with his flowing bookkeeper’s script, presently devised a
label, on which "Coca-Cola" was writ- ten in the fashion that is still employed.
Pemberton looked upon his mixture less as a refreshment than as a headache cure,
especially for people whose headache could be traced to
over-indulgence. On a morning late in 1886, one such victim of the night before dragged himself into an Atlanta drugstore and asked for a dollop of Coca-cola. Druggists customarily stirred a tea- spoonful of syrup into a glass of water, but in this instance the man on duty was too lazy to walk to the fresh-water tap, a couple of feet off. Instead, he mixed the syrup with some soda water, which was closer at hand. The suffering customer perked up almost at once, and word quickly spread that the best Coca-Cola was a fizzy one. |