Vintage 1960s-70s Coach and Four Tonic Water Label 🐎 from Philadelphia

Who Mixed With Coach and Four Tonic Water? 🐎 Vintage 1960s Soda Label, Philadelphia

Size: 3 1/2" x 2 1/2"

Of all the Coach and Four labels, I think this Tonic Water one is one of the sharpest: that little stagecoach, those clean colors, and two words on it, CONTAINS QUININE, that carry about four hundred years of history. Here's the story.

🐎 What's on it

COACH AND FOUR over a black coach-and-four silhouette, Tonic Water across the band, then "Contains quinine. Preserved with sodium benzoate." and along the foot, "Bottled under authority of Coach and Four Products Co., Phila., Pa. 19117." The back is plain paper.

👬 The people behind the stagecoach

The Coach and Four name was first used on soft drinks on June 26, 1956. Sheffield Bottling Co., a Philadelphia partnership doing business as "Coach 'N Four Products Co.," filed it with the U.S. Patent Office that July and had it registered on January 29, 1957 (trademark No. 640,759, for "maltless soft drinks and carbonated waters"). Harry Labovitz signed as a partner.

On July 11, 1969 the name and its goodwill passed to Coach and Four Products Company, a partnership of Harry Labovitz and Arthur Labovitz, then on North 6th Street in North Philadelphia, ZIP 19140. The trademark was renewed in 1977 and lapsed in 1997.

Now look at the ZIP on this one: 19117. That's Elkins Park, in Cheltenham Township, just over Philadelphia's northern city line. Most of the Coach and Four flavors carry 19140, but this Tonic Water, the Ginger Ale and the Club Soda carry 19117, so the company printed labels from two different addresses over its life. Two printings, two addresses, one little stagecoach.

The whole Coach and Four line ran to ginger ale, ginger beer, tonic water, bitter lemon, club soda, sarsaparilla and black raspberry, a full lineup of mixers.

📅 How old is it?

A five-digit ZIP can't be earlier than July 1, 1963, when ZIP codes began, and the name printed here is the name the Labovitz partnership carried from 1969. Late 1960s into the 1970s, a real vintage Philadelphia mixer label.

🌿 Quinine, the reason tonic exists

Quinine comes from the bark of the cinchona tree. The Spanish learned to use it in the 1600s from the Indigenous peoples of Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, and it became the first real treatment for malaria. In early 19th-century India, British officers and soldiers were told to take their quinine every day, and it was so bitter that they mixed it with soda and sugar to get it down. That was tonic water.

The first commercial tonic water was patented in 1858 by Erasmus Bond of Pitt & Co. in London. Soldiers were already adding their gin ration to it, and the gin and tonic shows up in print for the first time in the Oriental Sporting Magazine in 1868. Medicine became a cocktail.

Modern tonic is much gentler than the old medicine. In the United States the FDA caps quinine in tonic water at 83 parts per million. And here's my favorite bit of tonic trivia: put a glass of it under a blacklight and it glows blue, because the quinine soaks up the ultraviolet and gives it back as visible light.

🎨 A coach and four

A coach and four is a carriage pulled by four horses, driven four-in-hand by one driver holding every rein. Philadelphia's most famous one is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Thomas Eakins's The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand (1879 to 1880), which shows the engineer and coachman Fairman Rogers driving a coaching party through Fairmount Park. Eakins posed the horses from Eadweard Muybridge's 1878 photographs of horses in motion, so it's one of the first paintings to get a horse's stride exactly right. There's an old legal saying too, that a clever lawyer can drive a coach and four through any Act of Parliament, meaning there's always a loophole. A good name for a Philadelphia soda.

🏡 Display

This looks great framed behind a home bar, especially next to an old tonic bottle or a gin bottle, and it's even better with the rest of the Coach and Four flavors as a set.