Fizz Page 10
With so much money sloshing around the Coca-Cola bottling network, it didn’t take long before people began trying to get some of it for themselves too. The primitive and clunky bottling technology of the 1890s meant it wasn’t unusual for the odd piece of glass to get chipped off a bottle somewhere along the line and slip unnoticed into the drink. Mechanized cleaning and sterilization of bottles was also in its infancy in the 1890s, as were effective bottle seals. The invention of the bottle cap improved things immensely by offering a cleaner and more effective seal, but its arrival did little to quash public fears about unexpected “extras” in their bottled soda.
Stories abounded about gruesome finds. Glass chips, soil, sawdust, straw, cigarette ends, insects, spiders, feathers, human hair— the list seemed endless. Many of the claims were imaginary, but it happened often enough in reality to keep the tales of creepy crawlies lurking in bottled beverages circulating, and there was no shortage of lawyers ready to represent drinkers who said they had encountered dubious additions to their soda. Carbonated drink bottlers found themselves faced with claims about bottled frogs, mental agony inflicted by cola-drowned worms, soda spiked with poison, and exploding glassware. Much of the time they paid the claimant off to avoid the risk of adverse publicity. But as the number of claims mounted, Coke bottlers joined forces and in 1914 founded the Coca-Cola Bottlers’ Association, which kept tabs on repeat claimants and would handle the threats of legal action. One of its first acts was to look into getting insurance for its members, only to find the type of insurance it wanted didn’t exist. The association ended up working with an insurance company to create the first liability insurance policy in the United States.
Claims about unpleasant finds in bottled fizzy drinks also rewrote the world’s law books. On August 26, 1928, May Donoghue, a shop assistant from a poor area of Glasgow in Scotland, took a tram to Paisley to visit a friend. The pair met at the Wellmeadow Café, and Donoghue’s friend bought her a nonalcoholic ginger beer and ice cream float. The café owner opened the ten-ounce brown bottle of ginger beer, poured some over her ice cream and served the float. Donoghue tucked into the treat. After a while Donoghue’s companion topped off her friend’s float by pouring the rest of the ginger beer over her ice cream and that’s when, Donoghue later claimed, a decomposed snail plopped into her float. Having already consumed most of the drink, the thirty-year-old woman was horrified. A few days later she went to the Royal Glasgow Infirmary to be treated for gastroenteritis that she believed was caused by the rotting gastropod.
She decided to sue but found that she couldn’t take action against the café since her friend had bought the float. So she tried to sue David Stevenson, the Paisley company that made the ginger beer, but the Scottish courts rejected her claim on the grounds that she had no contract with the company. Determined not to give up, she took her battle for compensation to the House of Lords, Britain’s highest court. In December 1932, in one of the most significant legal decisions ever made, the lords sided with the Glaswegian single mother, ruling that a contract was unnecessary— the manufacturer of the drink had a duty to take reasonable care to protect its customers from harm. Since the decisions of the House of Lords were treated as common law not just in Britain but throughout the British Empire, the verdict instantly changed case law in Australia, Canada, India, Jamaica, New Zealand, and beyond. Yet even though the case transformed the law across the world, to this day no one knows if the snail that started it all even existed.
Twelve years later, another soda bottle incident confirmed a similar principle in US law. Gladys Escola, a waitress at a restaurant in Fresno, California, in the early 1940s, had just taken in the latest delivery of Coca-Cola from the local bottling company. She was placing the bottles one by one in the restaurant’s refrigerator when the bottle she was holding exploded in her hand. The glass cut deep, slicing a five-inch-long wound that severed blood vessels, nerves, and muscles. She sued the bottler, the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Fresno, and their legal fight ended up at the Supreme Court of California in July 1944. The court backed Escola, and Chief Justice Roger Traynor ruled that manufacturers were liable for harm caused by defective products even if they were not negligent, a principle that has since become enshrined in law throughout America. The precedents set by the cases brought by Escola and Donoghue strengthened consumer protection throughout the world, and it all started with a possibly fictitious snail drowning in ginger beer and an explosive bottle of Coca-Cola.
While the Coca-Cola bottlers were learning to joust with customers over flies and frogs in the 1910s, back in Atlanta the Coca-Cola Company embarked on altogether different legal campaign. In the wake of Coca-Cola’s success, hordes of copycat colas had flooded the market and sly soda fountain owners were serving customers cheaper imitators while telling them they were getting the real thing. Asa Candler’s answer was direct. He told his salesmen to punch soda fountain owners they caught substituting rival drinks as Coca-Cola. “Those first salesmen would say to the substitutors: ‘Now, if you don’t quit this, the next time I come here, you and I are going to have some trouble,’” John Powers, an early Coca-Cola salesman, told the company’s Refresher USA magazine in 1976. “One dealer told me he was once scared that the salesman I succeeded was going to punch him in the eye.”
Thumping wayward soda jerks might have quenched Candler’s thirst for justice but it did little to stop the rising tide of imitators. The list of Coca-Cola copycats at this time was enormous, numbering in the hundreds. Aside from Pepsi-Cola, people could drink Candy-Kola, Gay Cola, Roxa-Kola, Taka-Kola, Its-a-Cola, Afri-Kola, and Kiss-Kola. Some played on the way southerners pronounced Coca-Cola to come up with Co-Cola and Coke-Ola or sought to appeal to cyclists by christening their beverage Bicy-Cola. Others, like Kaw-Kola, harked back to their inspiration’s early days by lacing their syrup with plenty of cocaine. There was even Klu Ko Kolo, an Atlanta-based copycat hoping to cash in not just on Coca-Cola but on the revival of the Ku Klux Klan that followed D. W. Griffith’s 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation.
Most of these mimics didn’t get very far. Roxa-Kola never made it beyond eastern Kentucky, where it was created in 1906. But by the early 1910s clones such as Pepsi-Cola and Chero-Cola began to morph into something threatening. Chero-Cola originated in John Pemberton’s old home city of Columbus, Georgia, and was invented by a dour pharmacist named Claud Hatcher. Hatcher had moved into the soda bottling business in 1905 to produce drinks to sell in his family’s wholesale grocery store. He started out with a ginger ale called Royal Crown Ginger Ale before coming up with his Coca-Cola approximation Chero-Cola. After achieving local success he began selling bottling franchises, and by 1914 sales had topped $600,000 a year and were growing fast.
As copycats grew in number it was clear that Coca-Cola needed something more effective than salesmen with a good right hook, and Candler’s nephew Sam Dobbs believed he had the answer. The son of Asa’s older sister, Dobbs grew up in rural poverty. His childhood home was a one-room shack in Carroll County, Georgia, and he reached adulthood with just six months of schooling to his name. He moved to Atlanta in 1886 to work for his uncle Asa and to be tutored by another uncle: Bishop Warren Candler, a leading figure in the Southern Methodist Church that formed in 1844 in response to the Methodist Episcopal Church’s decision to oppose slavery. Dobbs loved Coca-Cola from the moment he first tasted it at an Atlanta soda fountain; he would drink more than a dozen a day. So when his uncle gained control of the business, he couldn’t wait to get started.
Dobbs fizzed with bright ideas about how to sell more Coca-Cola, and as he rose up the company ranks in the 1890s and 1900s he left a trail of innovations behind him. He gave the company’s salesmen generous expenses to make being a Coca-Cola peddler a prestigious job. He also ordered the sales force to teach soda jerks across the country how best to serve Coca-Cola. Working with Frank Robinson, Coca-Cola’s gentlemanly marketing guru, Dobbs masterminded the first wave of Coca-Cola ads to be painted on walls, starti
ng with one on the side of the Young Brothers Pharmacy in Cartersville, Georgia. As his list of achievements grew, so did Dobbs’s ambition. He became convinced that he should be the next boss of Coca-Cola rather than Asa’s eldest son, Howard. Fueled by a mix of burning ambition and jealousy, Dobbs set out to prove to his uncle that he, not Howard, was the real successor in waiting.
He began to undermine and sideline the mild-mannered Robinson until Asa put Dobbs in charge of advertising in 1906. Coca-Cola’s advertising had changed drastically since the dry, wordy promotions of the 1800s, largely thanks to the Massengale Advertising Agency, the Atlanta advertising agency hired by Robinson in 1902. Massengale’s modern, forward-thinking promotions showed Coca-Cola as part of daily life. The problem was that these scenes showed the wealthy at play: well-dressed women relaxing with a Coke after a day’s shopping, theatergoers sipping the cola in the intermission, and top-hatted aristocrats in fancy new automobiles. Dobbs wanted more egalitarian ads that could connect with a broader audience. On becoming the company’s advertising chief, he sidelined Massengale and brought in D’Arcy, a young advertising agency that had made a splash at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, creating a spectacular artificial waterfall that used water piped in from the Mississippi River to promote Cascade Whiskey.
Dobbs and D’Arcy took Coca-Cola advertising to a new level. Out went fusty and prim Victorian women, and in came young, attractive, girl-next door types who showed a little bit more leg and had a twinkle in their eyes. In 1908 they constructed a thirty-five-foot billboard alongside the Pennsylvania Railroad, which connected Philadelphia with New York City. The sign showed a giant pharmacist in white overalls using a ceramic Coca-Cola urn to dispense water pumped in via a four-hundred-foot pipeline connected to the city mains. The following year they hired an airship to float around the skies above Washington, DC, while carrying a huge Coca-Cola sign. Dobbs’s advertising skill also landed him the job of president of the Associated Advertising Clubs of America in 1909. He used this position to launch a “truth in advertising” campaign that urged advertisers to clean up their act and adopt honest promotions. Dobbs’s initiative led to the creation of one of the earliest codes of conduct for advertisers, and his efforts to weed out crooked campaigns earned him a place in the American Advertising Federation’s Hall of Fame.
As he sought to build his power base in the company, Dobbs started taking an interest in its legal affairs. He allied himself with Coca-Cola lawyer Harold Hirsch and, keen to stop company salesmen from brawling with potential customers, Dobbs encouraged Hirsch to use the courts to destroy the copycat colas. Hirsch responded by launching a campaign of legal action that would see more than five hundred imitators dragged before the courts over the next thirty years for trademark infringement. In 1916 alone the company successfully sued 153 imitators. Soon brands like Candy-Kola, Coke-Ola, and Kos-Kola were being stamped out of existence. Coca-Cola’s northern nemesis Moxie took note and started suing its own imitators Toxie, Noxie Kola, and Proxie out of existence.
In July 1913 Coca-Cola’s desire to crush its clones in court prompted Hirsch to ask the company’s bottling network to develop a distinctive Coca-Cola bottle for use throughout the United States. The idea of a uniform bottle had a lot of appeal. Refrigerators were still some years away, so stores kept bottled drinks chilled in tubs filled with ice and water. To get a drink, customers had to reach into the cold water and fish out a bottle. Since most soda bottles were indistinguishable by touch, customers usually wouldn’t know what they had until they had dragged it out of the icy water. Sometimes they wouldn’t even know after pulling out the bottle, because the paper labels often came off in the water. A bottle distinct enough to be instantly recognizable by touch and sight would fix this problem and boost sales. It could also be patented, adding an extra layer of legal protection against the copycats, and would double as a promotional tool by helping Coca-Cola stand out from the competition. In short, Hirsch envisaged a bottle that wasn’t just a container but a package capable of reinforcing a brand, lifting sales, and providing more ammunition for the legal team.
Word of Hirsch’s appeal for design suggestions eventually reached the Root Glass Company, a glassworks in Terre Haute, Indiana. The company’s founder Chapman Root gathered his top men together and asked them to create a design to submit to Coca-Cola. What happened next is now the stuff of claim and counterclaim, but what seems to be the most reliable version of events is this: Alex Samuelson, the Swedish plant superintendent, asked what Coca-Cola was made of. The men scratched their heads. No one knew. So auditor Clyde Edwards and bottle mold supervisor Earl Dean headed to the city’s Emeline Fairbanks Memorial Library. The librarian dug out a copy of Encyclopaedia Britannica and they looked up coca and cola but found little to inspire them. But while flipping through the encyclopedia they chanced upon an illustration of the cocoa pod with its ribbed, pumpkin-like segments. Although the chocolate-producing plant had no connection to Coca-Cola, Dean thought it would make a good basis for a bottle design and sketched out a copy of the cocoa pod. That night he developed a design: a bottle with ribs like those of a cocoa pod running from its neck to its base. The following day Dean produced a mold and the first prototype of his bottle design in green glass. Other versions of the story have Dean creating the mold and Samuelson designing the bottle based on the cocoa pod because Edwards got coca and cocoa mixed up at the library.
Whatever the details, the end result was the same: a distinctively ribbed, green glass prototype bottle with a thin neck that widens into a bulbous middle with the Coca-Cola logo embossed onto it, before tapering away until the very bottom, where it widens slightly to form the base of the container. The design was patented in November 1915 and sent to the committee of seven Coca-Cola bottlers charged with picking the winning design. In early 1916 after several days of discussion the Root Glass Company’s “contour bottle” won the vote six to one. After being selected, the bottle underwent further changes. The fat middle became less bulbous and the tapering between it and the base made less drastic, changes that gave the bottle a more appealing hourglass figure and made it better suited to the rigors of bottling plant production lines. By 1918 every Coca-Cola bottler was using the new bottle, and the royalties had made Chapman Root the richest man in Indiana.
The contour bottle was a packaging masterpiece, instantly recognizable by touch and in silhouette. The distinctive cocoa pod-inspired ribs ensured that even when a broken fragment of the glass was found, it was clear that it came from a Coca-Cola bottle. Raymond Loewy, the industrial designer who created some of the most iconic designs of the twentieth century, including Lucky Strike cigarette packets and Studebaker’s classic Avanti car, called it “the most perfectly designed package in use today.” It became one of the best-known packages in the world, gaining an iconic status to rival that of Robinson’s handwritten Coca-Cola logo. In 1960 the Coca-Cola bottle was so well recognized that it became one of the few items of packaging to be awarded a trademark.
While Dobbs and Hirsch had set to work destroying the competition with unique bottles and a blizzard of lawsuits, Asa Candler had been thinking about his future. He doubted that fizzy pop had much of a future and had started investing his fortune in real estate, erecting Candler Building skyscrapers across North America, including a seventeen-story tower in Atlanta that was the city’s tallest structure when it opened in 1906. He also used his wealth to help build the Atlanta suburb of Druid Hills and to bankroll Emory College’s transformation into Emory University.
He started thinking about selling Coca-Cola and moving on, but with the federal government case over caffeine that threatened the company’s all-important trademark dragging on, no one was willing to buy. Candler still lacked a buyer in 1916 when he decided to run for mayor of Atlanta. So he quit the company, divided up his shares among his five children and his wife, and appointed his son Howard president of the business. He went on to win the election by a comfortable margin.
With hi
s uncle gone, Dobbs saw an opportunity to finally become the boss of Coca-Cola. He found a potential buyer of the company in Ernest Woodruff, the battle-hardened Atlanta businessman who ran a bank called the Trust Company of Georgia. Woodruff had a reputation as a ruthless operator who did whatever it took to advance his business interests. Once he bought a bunch of houses in a red light district in Atlanta, where he planned to build a factory for one of his companies. After evicting the prostitutes and pimps, he made sure they and their customers stayed away by spending night after night patrolling the street with a shotgun.
Like many people in Atlanta, the Candlers knew who Woodruff was and they didn’t like him, so while Woodruff was interested in buying Coca-Cola, he knew they wouldn’t make a deal with him. Aware that this was the case, Dobbs offered to play deal maker by encouraging the Candler family to sell their shares to Woodruff and his partners. Dobbs’s bridge building worked. In 1919 Woodruff’s coalition of bankers bought the Coca-Cola Company for $25 million. Howard Candler was moved into the chairman’s seat, and Dobbs was rewarded for his role in the takeover with the post of company president that he had coveted for so long. But his soda boss dreams rapidly turned sour when, just a few months after taking charge, Coca-Cola was plunged into crisis.
The problem was sugar. World War I had shattered Europe’s sugar industry, which had been dominated by the sugar beet growers of the newly dismantled Austro-Hungarian Empire, causing a global shortage of the sweetener. Wartime price controls had kept sugar prices stable at nine cents a pound, but on December 1, 1919, the federal government lifted the restrictions. With sugar in short supply, prices skyrocketed. Within a few weeks the cost of sugar had climbed to twenty cents a pound and continued to rise. The price spike sent shock waves through the fizzy drink industry. Sugar was the main ingredient in the syrups they used to make their sodas, and in just a few days the price of this crucial commodity had more than doubled.