Charley Pemberton (1854-1894) was the son of John Pemberton, the inventor of Coca-Cola.

He suffered from alcoholism, and was considered a disappointment by his father. In 1888, he returned to Atlanta from Louisville, Kentucky and demanded a stake in his father's business - claiming that his father had once promised him the rights to the formula. John Pemberton corroborated his son's story, and Charley was a party to the incorporation of the Coca Cola Corporation.

The other owners of the company quickly came to dislike Charley, and - in an attempt to resolve the dispute - John Pemberton announced that he had sold the rights to the name to Charley (but not the formula). Charley left the Coca Cola Corporation (although he remained a shareholder), and set up shop selling a lower-quality version of the beverage, under the name Coca-Cola, in the summer of 1888. Asa Candler, fearing customers would try Charley's Coca-Cola and come to believe his own beverage was of poor quality, changed the name of his own drink first to Yum Yum and then to Koke (neither of which caught on).

In 1894, Candler incorporated a second company, The Coca Cola Corporation, to which Charley was not a party. This second corporation still markets the beverage today. Charley (as well as the first corporation's other partner, Woolfolk Walker ) could have caused significant legal trouble for Candler until the first corporation's charter expired in 1908.

Charley Pemberton died in 1894, at the age of forty, after an apparent overdose of opium.

References

1. Pendergrast, Mark: For God, Country, and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It. New York: Basic Books, 2000 (second edition; ISBN 0465054684).