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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 cola drink with celery extract. "He did not care anything about what he had already accomplished", one of his associates remarked, "he wanted something new". On August 16, 1888, John Pemberton passed away. His obituary described him as "the oldest druggist of Atlanta and one of her best-known citizens an especially popular gentleman". Comments John Pemberton's obsessive search for the perfect drink is typical of the inventor and of the early stages of a corporate history.
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