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Originally Posted by Electrophil
It's time to stump Bipa. She's always finds an answer. Let's come with something legit that she can't answer. 
I'll start out: Who came up with Mountain Dew and why? |
Here ya go. 
A pretty good history can be found here.
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Mountain Dew as we know it today had its beginnings with Hartman Beverages in Knoxville, Tennessee, Tri-City Beverages in Johnson City, Tennessee and the Tip Corporation of America, in Marion, Virginia. Its flavor and ownership changed before Pepsi acquired it in 1965, making it one of their major brands.
Charlie Gordon (see TRI-CITY BEVERAGE for more info) was told by Barney Hartman of Hartman Beverage on a train trip back from the Tennessee Bottler's Convention in Nashville about a product he made at his lake cabin and used locally. Barney and his brother Ally were known connoisseurs of the mixed drink and even kept an open bar in their Knoxville, Tennessee bottling plant. It seemed that the brothers had concocted their own private 'chaser', a special East Tennessee 'Zero Proof' soft drink for mixing with Jack Daniels, that they jokingly called "Mountain Dew".
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Another page has Jones as the inventor, but he actually only arrived later on the scene, when the flavour was changed.
Source: http://members.aol.com/seanborg/mtdew/trivia.htm
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Read about the confusion of who invented Mountain Dew here
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While one Bill Jones, a resident of Marion and the president of the Tip Corporation, is generally credited with concocting the Mountain Dew flavor that is familiar today, the Mountain Dew story actually begins elsewhere. Evidently, in the late 1940s, Hartman Beverage Company of Knoxville, Tennessee, bottled a lemon-lime drink they called Mountain Dew. Although this drink had some regional success, it never really caught on.
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One last source, then I need a refill (looking into empty coffee mug)
http://www.sodamuseum.bigstep.com/generic.jhtml?pid=6
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In 1925, a fellow by the name of William H. (Bill) Jones went to work for the National Fruit Flavor Company, selling the flavors used to make soft drinks to bottlers in the South. By all accounts, Bill was a great guy, who was not only a fruit flavor salesman, but also a good friend of the local bottlers. Bill and his friends could often be found playing golf, or hunting, or fishing, or having a drink together. No doubt about it, Bill and his friends were Good Ole Boys (by the way, a Good Ole Boy is a good thing). When one of those friends, Clay P. Church, started the Tip Corp. of America, Bill invested in the company and became a shareholder. Bill also became the manager of the Tip Corporation. Initially, Tip had been created to market a grape flavored drink that would compete with Grapette, a drink that was doing well on the soft drink market. Unfortunately, Tip's grape flavored drink never really caught on with the public. Church ended up filling for bankruptcy, and the Tip Corp. wasn't able to meet its obligations either. It wasn't long before other stockholders in the company started looking for someone to just take their stock in Tip, and relieve them from its obligations.
Bill didn't give up though, he started calling his bottling friends (who just happened to all be Pepsi bottlers), and he convinced them to invest in Tip. It turns out that none of these bottlers actually expected to make money with their investment, they actually thought they would never see their money again, but they wanted to help out an old friend. One of the new investors, Allie "Ollie" Hartman, also threw in an old dormant trademark by the name of Mountain Dew.
The original Mountain Dew had been a lithiated lemon-lime soda that Ollie marketed as a mixer for bars back in the 1940s (it was similar to 7 UP). The name of Mountain Dew had been given to this drink because of its use as a mixer, and because Mountain Dew was often used as a slang for the moonshine coming out of the hills in Virginia. The original Mountain Dew was even billed as "zero proof hillbilly moonshine." However, the original Mountain Dew seemed to have run its course, so Ollie just gave it to the Tip Corp.
Now, the first thing Bill did after he refinanced the Tip Corp. was to pay off its debts, and then he started working on a new flavor that would become Tip's new flagship product. Bill was a pretty bright fellow, and he realized two things. First, the majority of his buddies were Pepsi bottlers, as were all of the investors in Tip. Surely, these would be the same people that would be buying and bottling the new Tip flagship product (at least initially). Second, he realized that Pepsi didn't have a lemon-lime soda. Bill quickly through all of his efforts into making the best lemon-lime flavored soda on the market. He called it Mountain Dew, which had been a similarly flavored drink, and the new Mountain Dew quickly became the Tip Corp's leading product.
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