Untangling the Lie of the 7Up Origin Story
There is no Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda here!
The first thing you learn while researching the origin of the name 7Up is that no one knows the origin of the name 7Up.
We may never learn what Charles Leiper Grigg was thinking when he developed his signature beverage in the 1920s and '30s. “It’s a mystery,” a company spokesman once told the Pensacola News-Journal. “How it came to be called Seven-Up is anybody’s guess,” wrote the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1986. “Grigg died before telling posterity what he had in mind.” There are plenty of theories.1 Some are better than others. But there is no definitive answer.
There is, however, a second thing you will learn while researching the origin of the name 7Up, and this is that it was originally called Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda.
It’s everywhere. This is on Wikipedia. It’s on Snopes. They ran it once in TIME. Look at in this article published by McGill University. There is seemingly no debate about the fact that it was first named Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda. (And it did contain a bit of real, honest-to-god, mood-enhancing lithium, at least until the FDA banned it from soft drinks after World War II.) The claim pops up in every piece of writing about the soda’s name. Grigg launched the drink in Missouri in the late 1920s, and he’d renamed it 7Up by the middle of the 1930s, but its early years were seemingly definitively spent as Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda.
Which struck me as insane.
Come on. Think about that for a minute. It’s a terrible name! That’s eleven syllables! And in an era where soda was frequently ordered at a counter out loud—there was real value in a catchy name. You’re telling me someone decided in that context to call their drink Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda? Absolutely not. I could entertain the idea that all of these words showed up on the bottle. But as the name itself? No. There wasn’t even a convenient way to shorten it: All you’d be left with is the way-too-generic-to-be-of-use “lemon-lime soda.” It didn’t make sense even with the context that Grigg had apparently wised up and renamed it a few years later. The man was a serial beverage entrepreneur, and his first two soft drinks were both orange sodas, the first called Whistle and the second called Howdy. Those are both pretty great names! As is 7Up! You want me to believe the guy behind those zingy handles also named a drink Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda? This is the claim in seemingly every bit of writing about this soda. And yet!
I felt in my bones it was wrong. So off I went to see if there was any proof that Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda was actually the original name of 7Up.
My starting point was the archive at my beloved Newspapers.com. And it turns out there were many, many, many articles from the 1970s to the 1990s about how B-LLL-LS was the original 7Up. Yet none had clear sourcing. This was, it seemed, the sort of claim that gets repeated often enough to become accepted as fact. The American people have apparently been asking for decades why 7Up is called 7Up, only to learn there is no good answer here, but there is a fun tidbit about it originally being called Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda. Every story about the history of the drink included a cursory mention of this history. None of them explained it.
Time for me to go backwards. I narrowed my search window from 1925 to 1960. That would give me advertisements and articles alike from the period in which the drink was (supposedly) actually named this, along with the decades right after, which might give some hint as to the origin of the claim. It seemed like a safe bet to find something.
And do you want to guess how many times “Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda” appears from 1925 to 1960 in the tens of thousands of newspapers housed on Newspapers.com?
Zero.
Which, you know, this archive is not exhaustive, and the name being absent from their records certainly does not mean it was never used. But it had me feeling pretty good about my theory! Forget articles. There are a lot of ads in those newspapers. And there was not one for Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda? Not a stray mention? Even as fine print in some ad copy? Suspicious.
It had me thinking maybe, just maybe, from the very beginning, it had in fact been called 7Up (or Seven Up or 7-Up or Seven-Up). So I narrowed my search window again, now to just 1928 to 1932, and I searched for any mention of “7Up soda” or “seven up soda” or “7-Up soda” or “seven-up soda.”2 The general consensus from those popular histories was that it had been officially renamed in 1936. But I wanted to look a few years prior. I wanted to go as close to the beginning as possible. And I found…
Plenty of examples of the soda being advertised as 7 Up or 7-Up. AS EARLY AS 1930! With, yes, mentions of it being lithiated and including lemon. The most common full name seemed to be “7-Up Lemon Soda.” But there was nothing about the style of the label. No one mentioned lime. There were not eleven syllables. There was some extra information here, sure, but it seemed an awful lot to me like 7 Up had always been 7 Up.
It all left me one place left to look. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
WELL WELL WELL.
Do you want to guess how many trademark filings there were for Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda? Come on. You know. That’s right. None! The corporate entity that became the 7 Up Company never filed anything for Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda. Neither did anyone else. There is no indication that anyone had designs on selling a product with this language. And do you want to guess when Charles Leiper Grigg filed his first application for “Seven Up”?
October 4, 1928, with a note that it had been in use for his carbonated, nonalcoholic soft drink since August 7, 1928. Months before it was popularly launched in 1929. When it was still in testing. From the very beginning. Our friend Charles Leiper Grigg tinkered with formulas and imprints and marketing strategies. But he did not seem to waver on the name. This drink was born Seven Up. No lithiated. No lemon. No lime. Just Seven Up.
(Even though it was also described as “Seven-Up” in the initial trademark filing, and the first logo illustration a few years later was for “7Up.” The style questions have been there from the beginning, too.)
The answer had been there all along, open to anyone with the same weird, obsessive drive that had captured me. (Which presumably is not many people, but it’s at least a few, as evidenced by this excellent paper I later found from Bob Brown and Bill Lockart at the Society for Historical Archaeology, which has far more detailed research than my own cursory dip but ends in the same place.) Yet the myth of Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda still lived for decades.
Much like me, Brown and Lockart could not find any evidence of the name showing up in any capacity from before 1960. The name seemingly did not exist at all outside of its own legend. Brown and Lockart’s first sighting of it came in a 1967 newspaper article about the history of 7Up, where it was described by a veteran company executive (who, crucially, was hired early on but still after this supposed renaming would have occurred), a detail about the company before he worked there he now was relaying decades later.
It’s not hard to see how this could be a good story. “You know, at the beginning, it was Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda,” a coworker says. “And then after a few years, we realized that was crazy, so now it’s 7Up.” You could indeed find all of those individual adjectives in the early days of the soda: It was a lithiated lemon-lime soda that Grigg had originally hoped to sell with “bib labels” draped over the bottle rather than pasted on. The description was accurate. But the idea of it as a name was not. That gets held on to for decades, maybe remembered incorrectly, shifting a little, and then eventually gets repeated to a reporter for a retrospective. Maybe it was a joke. Maybe it was a simple mistake. Maybe it was the reporter who got it wrong. But it made it into that one article in the Oshkosh Northwestern, and that was enough to give it life for decades, a throwaway bit of story color that eventually calcified into fact.
But if you are ever at a party, or in a trivia contest, or whatever other social environment this could possibly come up, and someone tells you 7Up was originally Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda, you have a response. “Actually,” you can say, “I subscribe to a newsletter run by a girl who is clearly pretty demented, and she learned that’s not true.”
Such as: The drink has seven key ingredients. It was originally sold in 7-oz. bottles. Grigg pulled in a bunch of money playing craps by rolling sevens, or he was intrigued by a cattle brand with a “7” and a “U,” or he won a poker game on a seventh card turned upwards.
For the style freaks: I have been using “7Up” as my default, because it’s the current official corporate style, but it has been known as all of the above at various points.
Entertaining read. Great investigative reporting! Pondering applying for TM on Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda
This is the investigative reporting I crave! I bow down to how deep you dug for this.