Coca-Cola Appears On The Market

 May 8, 1886:

Pharmacist John Styth Pemberton first sells a carbonated beverage named "Coca-Cola" as a patent medicine.
The prototype Coca-Cola recipe was formulated at the Eagle Drug and Chemical Company, a drugstore in Columbus, Georgia, by John Pemberton, originally as a coca wine called Pemberton's French Wine Coca. He may have been inspired by the formidable success of Vin Mariani, a European coca wine.
In 1886, when Atlanta and Fulton County passed prohibition legislation, Pemberton responded by developing Coca-Cola, essentially a non-alcoholic version of French Wine Coca. The first sales were at Jacob's Pharmacy in Atlanta, Georgia, on May 8, 1886. It was initially sold as a patent medicine for five cents a glass at soda fountains, which were popular in the United States at the time due to the belief that carbonated water was good for the health. Pemberton claimed Coca-Cola cured many diseases, including morphine addiction, dyspepsia, neurasthenia, headache, and impotence. Pemberton ran the first advertisement for the beverage on May 29 of the same year in the Atlanta Journal.
By 1888, three versions of Coca-Cola – sold by three separate businesses – were on the market. Asa Griggs Candler acquired a stake in Pemberton's company in 1887 and incorporated it as the Coca Cola Company in 1888. The same year, Pemberton sold the rights a second time to four more businessmen: J.C. Mayfield, A.O. Murphey, C.O. Mullahy and E.H. Bloodworth. Meanwhile, Pemberton's son Charley Pemberton began selling his own version of the product.

On a related note, the family of the formulator of Pepsi is suing the company:

The lawsuit asks the court for undisclosed damages for what it called Pepsi's "improper interference with their rights in the Ritchie invention and the Ritchie documents."
It said the documents had been "physically and legally" controlled by a member of the Ritchie family for more than 50 years. The estate of Ritchie's late son, Richard, was also identified as a plaintiff.
Richard Ritchie was a chemist with the Loft Candy Company when he developed the Pepsi-Cola formula for Loft in 1931. He stayed with Pepsi-Cola after it became independent, but joined Cantrell & in 1962. Ritchie retired in 1982 and died in January 1985.
According to the lawsuit "the heirs are the rightful owners of the Ritchie invention because, inter alia, Pepsi failed to require that Mr Ritchie transfer ownership to the Ritchie invention to Pepsi despite knowing that he had developed the Pepsi-Cola formula while working as an employee of another company."

Damn, you would think in the era of gas chromatographs that secret recipes would mean nothing.