THE COCA COLA COMPANY IS INCORPORATED IN ATLANTA

The Grandma & Claire in Les Corts, Barcelona

The Grandma has gone out today with Claire Fontaine to celebrate the anniversary of the Coca-Cola Company that was incorporated in Atlanta, Georgia, on a day like today in 1889.

The Grandma is a great consumer of this wonderful and exciting drink and she has invited her friends to commemorate this event drinking some Coca-Cola in one of the best places in La Plaça de la Concòrdia, in Les Corts.

Before going out, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Grammar 74).

More information: Spelling 1

The Coca-Cola Company is an American corporation, and manufacturer, retailer, and marketer of nonalcoholic beverage concentrates and syrups. The company is best known for its flagship product Coca-Cola, invented in 1886 by pharmacist John Stith Pemberton in Atlanta, Georgia.

The Coca-Cola formula and brand were bought in 1894 by Asa Griggs Candler, who incorporated The Coca-Cola Company. The company -headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, but incorporated in Wilmington, Delaware -has operated a franchised distribution system since 1889: the Company only produces syrup concentrate, which is then sold to various bottlers throughout the world who hold exclusive territories.

The company owns its anchor bottler in North America, Coca-Cola Refreshments. The company's stock is listed on the NYSE and is part of DJIA, the S&P 500 index, the Russell 1000 Index, and the Russell 1000 Growth Stock Index. 

Old memories of Claire in the Coca-Cola Atlanta HQ

In 1886, pharmacist John Pemberton from Columbus, Georgia invented the original Coca-Cola drink and sold it as a medicinal beverage. Pemberton's bookkeeper, Frank M. Robinson, is credited naming the products and creating its logo.

Robinson chose the name Coca-Cola because of its two main ingredients, coca leaves and kola nuts, and because it sounded like an alliteration. John Pemberton had taken a break and left Robinson to make, promote, as well as sell Coca-Cola on his own. He promoted the drink the best he could with the limited budget that he had and succeeded.

In 1894, American businessman Asa Candler purchased the company from Pemberton's heirs with the intent to advertise and sell it as a beverage to regular consumers. Candler was one of the first businessmen to use merchandising in his advertising strategy.

More information: Coca-Cola

By 1895, Coca-Cola was being sold in every state in the union. Coca-Cola’s first ad read Coca Cola. Delicious! Refreshing! Exhilarating! Invigorating!

As of 1948, Coca-Cola had claimed about 60% of the market share. In 1919, the company was sold to Ernest Woodruff's Trust Company of Georgia. By 1984, The Coca-Cola Company's market share decreased to 21.8% due to new competitors, namely Pepsi, being released.

In general, The Coca-Cola Company and its subsidiaries only produce syrup concentrate, which is then sold to various bottlers throughout the world who hold a local Coca-Cola franchise. Coca-Cola bottlers, who hold territorially exclusive contracts with the company, produce the finished product in cans and bottles from the concentrate, in combination with filtered water and sweeteners. The bottlers then sell, distribute, and merchandise the resulting Coca-Cola product to retail stores, vending machines, restaurants, and food service distributors. Outside the United States, these bottlers also control the fountain business.

Delivery Driver Coca-Cola, old memories

Since the early 1980s, the company has actively encouraged the consolidation of bottlers, with the company often owning a share of these anchor bottlers.

The Coca-Cola Company also produces a number of other soft drinks including Fanta, introduced circa 1941, and Sprite. Fanta's origins date back to World War II during a trade embargo against Germany on cola syrup, making it impossible to sell Coca-Cola in Germany. Max Keith, the head of Coca-Cola's German office during the war, decided to create a new product for the German market, made from products only available in Germany at the time, which they named Fanta. The drink proved to be a hit, and when Coke took over again after the war, it adopted the Fanta brand as well.

Fanta was originally an orange flavored soft drink which can come in plastic bottles or cans. It has become available in many different flavors now such as grape, peach, grapefruit, apple, pineapple, and strawberry.

More information: World of Coca

In 1961, Coca-Cola introduced Sprite, a lemon-lime soft drink, and another of the company's bestsellers and its response to 7 Up.

Tab was Coca-Cola's first attempt to develop a diet soft drink, using saccharin as a sugar substitute. Introduced in 1963, the product is still sold today, although its sales have dwindled since the introduction of Diet Coke.

While not necessarily having naming rights to anything in all locations, the company does sponsor and provide beverages in many theme parks, usually in an exclusive capacity. This includes the Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, Merlin Entertainment, Universal Parks & Resorts, Six Flags, Cedar Fair, and SeaWorld Entertainment which are six of the nine largest theme park operators worldwide, it is unknown whether OCT Parks China, the Chimelong Group, or Fantawild, the fourth, seventh, and eighth largest theme park operators respectively, use Coca-Cola.

The company also directly sponsors, with naming rights, the Coca-Cola London Eye and the Coca-Cola Orlando Eye.

More information: Coca-Cola Company

There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola. 

Leslie Fiedler

AUGUST 15, 1977: 6EQUJ5, THE WOW! SIGNAL

The Wow! signal celestial location

Today it's the 40th anniversary of the Wow! signal. Joseph de Ca'th Lon wants to talk us about it.

The Wow! signal was a strong narrowband radio signal received on August 15, 1977 by Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope in the United States, then used to support the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The signal appeared to come from the constellation Sagittarius and bore the expected hallmarks of extraterrestrial origin.

Astronomer Jerry R. Ehman discovered the anomaly a few days later while reviewing the recorded data. He was so impressed by the result that he circled the reading on the computer printout and wrote the comment Wow! on its side, leading to the event's widely used name.

More information: WOW Signal recieved at SETI on August, 15 1977

The entire signal sequence lasted for the full 72-second window during which Big Ear was able to observe it, but has not been detected since, despite several subsequent attempts by Ehman and others. Many hypotheses have been advanced on the origin of the emission, including natural and man-made sources, but none of them adequately explains the result. The Wow! signal remains therefore the strongest candidate for an alien radio transmission ever detected.

Astronomer Jerry R. Ehman

In 1973, after completing an extensive survey of extragalactic radio sources, Ohio State University assigned the now-defunct Big Ear telescope, then located near the Perkins Observatory in Delaware, Ohio, to the scientific Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI), in the longest-running program of its kind in history.

Over a decade earlier, in a 1959 paper, Cornell physicists Philip Morrison and Giuseppe Cocconi had speculated that any extraterrestrial civilization attempting to communicate via radio signals might do so using a frequency of 1420 megahertz, which is naturally emitted by hydrogen, the most common element in the universe and therefore likely familiar to all technologically advanced civilizations.

By 1977, Ehman was working at the SETI project as a volunteer; his job involved analyzing by hand large amounts of data processed by an IBM 1130 minicomputer and printed on perforated paper. While perusing data collected on August 15 at 22:16 EDT -02:16 UTC-, he spotted a series of values of signal intensity and frequency that left him and his colleagues astonished.

More information: Ohio History Central

The alphanumeric sequence circled by Ehman, 6EQUJ5, represents the intensity variation of the radio signal over time, measured as unitless signal-to-noise ratio and ranging from 0 to 36, with the noise averaged over the previous few minutes. Each individual character corresponds to a sample of the signal, taken every 12 seconds. A space character on the printout denotes an intensity between 0 and 1; the numbers 1 to 9 denote the correspondingly numbered intensities -from 1 to 9-; intensities of 10 and above are indicated by a letter: A corresponds to intensities between 10 and 11, B to 11 to 12, and so on. The highest measured value was U -an intensity between 30 and 31-, that is thirty times stronger than normal background noise.

Sky on August 15, 1977

A common misconception is that the Wow! signal constitutes some sort of message. 

In fact, what was received appears to be an unmodulated, continuous wave signal with no encoded information; essentially a flash of radio energy. 

The string 6EQUJ5 is merely the representation of the expected variation of signal intensity over time, expressed in the particular measuring system adopted for the experiment.

At the time of the observation, the Big Ear radio telescope was only adjustable for declination -or height above the horizon-, and relied instead on the rotation of the Earth to scan across the sky. Given the speed of Earth's rotation and the spatial width of the telescope's observation window, the Big Ear could observe any given point for just 72 seconds. A continuous extraterrestrial signal, therefore, would be expected to register for exactly 72 seconds, and the recorded intensity of such signal would display a gradual increase for the first 36 seconds -peaking at the center of the observation window- and then a gradual decrease. All these characteristics are present in the Wow! signal.

More information: Phys

The Wow! signal was a narrowband emission: its bandwidth was less than 10 kHz. The Big Ear telescope was equipped with a receiver capable of measuring fifty 10 kHz-wide channels. The output from each channel was represented in the computer printout as a column of alphanumeric intensity values. The Wow! signal is essentially confined to one column.

A person not familiar with all of the special knowledge about a particular instrument should not try to draw too many conclusions from printed data. Such data typically contains certain assumptions about the equipment not necessarily known to outsiders.
 

Jerry R. Ehman