here we are

he company's interests to stretch to extravagances such as giving out free drink coupons as a promotional exercise. With oil-cloth banners and streetcar signs, the drink began to sell extremely well.
It is not clear why exactly Pemberton then sold the rights to the Coca-Cola formula - he had developed cancer and it is possible that his morphine addiction was now very serious - but in 1887, Willis Venable and George Lowndes purchased two-thirds of the rights. He told Lowndes "I am sick, and I believe I will never get out of this bed. The only thing I have is Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola some day will be a national drink. I want to keep a third interest in it so that my son will always have a living". Little did Pemberton know that his son Charley would be dead from a morphine overdose only six years later.
Pemberton's illness worsened, but he remained obsessed with perfecting the Coca-Cola formula. Several times in his dying months he struggled to his laboratory to experiment with a modified ...