Free Fizz by Tristan Donovan

to help jolt customers into buying some Hires Root Beer extract. To improve brand recognition among children, Hires cameup with the Hires Root Boy, a chubby infant mascot who always wanted one more root beer.
    The scale of Hires’s promotional campaign was unheard of for a soft drink. It was a campaign worthy of the biggest-spending patent medicine makers, who had set the pace for advertising ambition for most of the 1800s with their brazen claims, spectacular medicine shows, and giant billboards. Hires’s promotional push caused a rapid rise in sales. Within five years he had gone from selling enough extract to make 11,520 glasses of his root beer every year to selling enough to make nearly 1.5 million drinks. As the mustached business tycoon noted in an interview: “Business success is built upon two foundation rocks. One is to make your product as nearly perfect as possible. The second is to be energetic and tireless in selling it.” Hires’s recipe for success would not be lost on two new carbonated drink brands that burst into life a few years later in the mid-1880s, both fueled by their creators’ interest in patent medicine and dreams of wealth: Moxie and Coca-Cola.
    Moxie started out in 1876 as Moxie Nerve Food, a nostrum invented by a spiritualist named Dr. Augustin Thompson. Born in Union, Maine, in 1835, Thompson trained as a blacksmith before deciding to become a doctor while serving in the Union infantry during the Civil War. On being discharged in July 1865 he enrolled at the Hahnemann Homeopathic College in Philadelphia, a medical school that taught the theories of Samuel Hahnemann, a German with a distrust of mainstream medicine to rival that of Samuel Thomson. Hahnemann believed that “like cures like,” so if a substance induced symptoms similar to a specific disease then it would cure that illness. After finding his medicines often proved toxic, he decided his cures would work safely if diluted and devised a dilution method so extreme that what he gave patients was nothing more than water. It was outlandish quackery, but in an age when professional medicine often failed to deliver results, his remedies caught on. By 1875 there were six thousand homeopathic doctors at work in the United States alone.
    Thompson lapped up Hahnemann’s theories, and on completing his studies in 1867 he headed to Lowell, Massachusetts, doctorate in hand. On reaching the industrial textiles town he opened a homeopathic practice.Within ten years it was the largest homeopathic practice in New England, but by then Thompson was captivated by the stories about the druggists who had gotten into the patent medicine business and were now making incredible profits.
    Thompson decided to make some nostrums of his own and in 1876 launched Moxie Nerve Food. He told his customers that this powerful, dark brown potion was named after his good friend Lieutenant Moxie, whom he met while studying at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Lieutenant Moxie went on to discover a nameless miracle plant in the Strait of Magellan. This turnip-shaped plant, he continued, is the basis of Moxie Nerve Food and has incredible curative powers. It could, Thompson claimed, “recover brain and nervous exhaustion; loss of manhood, imbecility and helplessness.” Not only that but “paralysis, softening of the brain, locomotor ataxia, and insanity when caused by nervous exhaustion” too. Not to mention restoring the appetite, banishing tiredness, and curing alcoholism.
    In common with most patent medicines sold at the time, the sales pitch for Moxie Nerve Food was nothing but lies. Thompson never attended West Point. Lieutenant Moxie didn’t exist nor did the magic turnip from South America. The main flavorings were sugar, wintergreen, and gentian root extract, resulting in a drink that tasted like a bitter root beer with a licorice-like aftertaste. The Moxie name was likely borrowed from the