By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

We always worried that nuclear bomb-making would make its way to the ‘Net, but who knew that the biggest leak would be America’s most guarded secret: the formula for Coca Cola? Fake or inevitable? (See comments at the end.)

Account and formula book belonging to Dr. J.S. Pemberton while a druggist in Columbus

While reviewing the book Pendergrast came upon a recipe for “Celery Cola” and quickly realized that this was not an early formulary guide of Pemberton’s. This was in fact a formulary book produced shortly before Pemberton’s death, and there was a good chance that it contained the original Coca-Cola formula.

Pendergrast knew that “Celery Cola” was the recipe Pemberton was working on at the time of his death, and he was also aware of the story of Pemberton’s apprentice and an old formulary book. The story went that a young man named John P. Turner went to apprentice with the elderly John Pemberton, and not long after starting his apprenticeship Mr. Pemberton died. Young Mr. Turner went back to his home of Columbus, GA., and took one of Pemberton’s formulary books with him. In 1943, a son of Mr. Turner’s happened to show the formulary book, which did contain a recipe for Coca-Cola, to a member of Coca-Cola’s board. The board member managed to acquire the book from Turner’s son, and no one had seen the book since (or at least until Pendergrast found it in their archives).

As Pendergrast looked through the old pages of what remained of Pemberton’s formulary guide he came upon a page that was unlabeled except for an ‘X’ at the top of the page. Sure enough, he had found an original Coca-Cola formula. This is the formula that is shown above. Source: Sodamuseum

We Say: Why doesn’t someone whip up a batch and do a real taste test? And surely a chemist can get the facts right at a molecular level. Beats testing home-brewed nuclear bombs. So, do you buy this? We do and don’t.

Update: Here’s some interesting background on the whole Coca Cola formula thanks to Snopes.com:

From Have a Cloak and a Smile:

In a disingenuous way, even if the Pendergrast version were the original, Coca-Cola would still be right about the “not accurate” part. Changes were made to the recipe between the time Pemberton marketed it in 1886 and Woodruff in the 1920s made it company canon that the formula would hereafter not be tinkered with: glycerin was added as a preservative, cocaine was eliminated, caffeine was greatly reduced, and citric acid was replaced with phosphoric acid, to name the changes we know about. Therefore, even if the Pendergrast version were dead on, it still would not be the formulation currently in use, because important changes were later made to it. Source: Snopes.com

Thanks CharlieB3