Since the advent of mass production, millions of products have come and gone. Even some innovative and successful products outlive their usefulness, fading into the sands of time alongside interesting failures and ill-conceived fiascoes.

The following products have been around for a very long time, some for a hundred years or more. They’ve become an iconic and ingrained part of our culture, and the little-known and fascinating stories behind their creation and marketing deserve to be told.

Dr Pepper

It’s somewhat of a misconception that Dr Pepper was created by a doctor (we can’t imagine why), but it’s not too far from the truth. The inventor of the world’s oldest soft drink (in 1885) was Charles Alderton, a pharmacist at Morrison’s Old Corner Drug Store in Waco, Texas. It’s also somewhat commonly believed that it was created as a medicine, but that’s untrue: Alderton just enjoyed mixing up flavorful, fizzy stuff when we wasn’t being a pharmacist. He enjoyed the smell of all the fruity syrups from the soda fountain mingled together, and set out to create a drink that tasted like that smell.
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