Finance History|11 Wall Street — About Forty Dollars for Half a Million Common Shares

People treat Coca-Cola as an Atlanta concentrate house that always printed KO.

The 1919 issuer was a new Delaware company assembled to buy the Georgia business.

The New York Times of 23 August 1919 recorded that a syndicate led by the Trust Company of Georgia would offer 500,000 common shares of the new Coca-Cola Company at about 40 dollars a share in 1919 currency.

The same dispatch said 10 million dollars of 7 percent cumulative non-voting preferred would stand beside the common, and that the common would sit in a five-year voting trust at Guaranty Trust Company of New York.

The company's investor FAQ dates the New York Stock Exchange listing to 5 September 1919.

Its share-history page records the original issue as 600,000 shares: 100,000 preferred at 100 dollars par and 500,000 common without par.

That page also records eleven subsequent splits, beginning with a one-for-one stock dividend on 25 April 1927.

The mechanism is a recapitalization sale. The Candler family interest was taken out by a Georgia syndicate that then sold a public common book against a preferred layer and a voting trust.

Holders bought concentrate and fountain syrup, not a bottling plant. The bottlers remained separate contracts.

The pin is the Broad Street facade of the Exchange, where the 1919 common printed. Interior trading is not visitable from the sidewalk.

Photo: Arild Vagen, August 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. New York Stock Exchange from Broad Street.