First sold in 1885 at Morrison's Old Corner Drug Store in Waco, Texas, Dr Pepper is the oldest soft drink in America. It was soon followed by Coca-Cola (1886), Pepsi-Cola (1898), IBC Root Beer (1919), 7-UP (1929), Sprite (1961), and countless other soft drinks that have long since disappeared from the shelves. In 1929, there were more than 600 lemon-lime soft drinks alone on the market!

Sprite is marketed with the slogan "Obey Your Thirst." Sprite was first introduced by the Coca Cola company in 1961.

IBC Root Beer was developed in 1919 by the Independent Breweries Company in St. Louis as an alternative to alcoholic beverages during prohibition.

When C.L. Grigg first introduced 7-UP to the world in 1929, he called it "Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda." Although there were already more than 600 lemon-lime soft drinks on the market, Grigg's new brand sold well enough to keep him afloat--even through the stock market crash which occurred just two weeks after he introduced the drink--and, thankfully, he soon changed the name to the much easier to pronounce "7-UP."

Born in the hills of Tennessee in the 1940s, Mountain Dew was originally invented by two brothers, Barney and Ally Hartman, for use as a mixer with whiskey. Mountain Dew is actually slang for "moonshine," and some of the early bottles were even adorned with sketches of a character called Willy the Hillbilly!

On May 15, 1950, Coca Cola became the first product ever to appear on the cover of Time Magazine. This issue also featured an in-depth article about the Coca Cola Company.

In 1894, Joseph A. Biedenharn sold the first bottles of Coca Cola -- previously it had been sold as a fountain drink only. The first cans of Coke appeared in 1955.

The "A" and "W" in A&W Root Beer stand for "Allen" and "Wright," the two founders of the company. Roy Allen purchased a root beer formula from an Arizona pharmacist and sold his first mug of root beer in 1919. In 1922, he took a partner -- Frank Wright, one of his original employees. Two years later, in 1924, Allen bought wright's share of the business back, but he stuck with the name, and the rest is history. By 1933, he had more than 170 franchised A&W outlets, and by 1950 he had more than 450 outlets nationwide.

When Caleb Bradham first created his own carbonated soft drink to serve fountain customers at his drugstore, he called the concoction "Brad's Drink." On August 28, 1898, Bradham renamed his invention "Pepsi-Cola."

In July of 1985, Coca Cola became the first soft drink consumed in outer space. It was enjoyed by astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger who sipped the soda from a specially designed "space can."