On May 8, 1886, Dr. John Pemberton (above) brought his
perfected syrup to Jacobs’ Pharmacy in downtown Atlanta
where the first glass of Coca‑Cola was poured.
Initially, the drink was marketed as a medicinal tonic called
“French Wine Coca.”
Serving about nine drinks per day in its first year, Coca‑Cola
was an exciting new drink in the beginning.
On April 21, 1895, Woodville Latham and his sons, Otway
and Gray, demonstrated their “Panopticon,” the first movie
projector developed in the United States.
Although motion pictures had been shown in the United States
for several years using Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, the films
could only be viewed one at a time in a peep-show box, not
projected to a large audience.
Brothers Grey and Otway Latham, the founders of a company
that produced and exhibited films of prize fights using the
Kinetoscope, called on their father, Woodville, and W.K.L.
Dickson, an assistant in the Edison Laboratory, to help them
develop a device that would project life-sized images onto a
screen in order to attract larger audiences.
In 1931 while looking for a way to keep his company’s shortcake-
baking machinery busy when strawberries are out of season,
manager James Dewar tried injecting one of the cakes with
cream filling. He dubbed his creation the Twinkie.
James Alexander Dewar (1897-1985)
Though today there is almost nothing as ubiquitous as a bottle
of Coca-Cola, this was not always the case. For the first several
years of its existence, Coke was only available as a fountain
drink, and its producer saw no reason for that to change.
Originally developed as a non-addictive substitute for morphine,
then marketed as a non-alcoholic "temperance drink," Coca-Cola
was invented by John Pemberton, a druggist in Columbus,
Georgia, in 1886.
In 1915, the bottlers put out a call for a new design, one so
distinctive that one could recognize it if it were in pieces on
the ground or by feeling it in the dark. The winning design,
produced by the Root Glass Company of Terre Haute, Indiana,
gave the world the iconic contoured bottle we know today.
On February 19, 1878, Thomas Edison was awarded U.S. Patent
No. 200,521 for his invention—the phonograph.
The technology that made the modern music business possible
came into existence in the New Jersey laboratory where Edison
created the first device to both record sound and play it back.
