#Vernor's

[detroitlib]

View of the Vernor's Ginger Ale Company building. Printed on front: "Home of Vernor's ginger ale, Detroit, Michigan." Handwritten on front: "Atwater. Woodbridge. Mariners Church before moving." Printed on back: "An attraction to Detroiters and out of town visitors is the Vernor Ginger Ale Co. Located at the foot of Woodward Avenue on the Detroit River it serves a refreshing beverage and displays its assembly line technique for bottling its products. Pub. by Bennett Bros., Detroit, Mich."

Clarence Faber Collection

Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library

[fxdltc88]

James Vernor was a junior clerk at Higby and Sterns’ Drug Store in Detroit when he enlisted in the 4th Michigan Cavalry and was called to fight in the Civil War. At the time (according to company lore), he was experimenting with a stomach calming tonic of vanilla, spices and ginger, which he left behind in an oak cask. When Vernor returned four years later, he found that his elixir had transformed into a zesty, sweet, gingery drink complimented by the wood’s aging process. Soon after, Vernor opened his own pharmacy 235 Woodward Avenue, and its soda fountain became the first – and only! – place in the world to buy Vernor’s ginger ale in 1866.

Vernor was admired as a pharmacist. He closely scrutinized his prescriptions for quality, accuracy, and possible drug interactions. Vernor was meticulous about his work. Everything he did needed to meet his high standards. He served on the State Board of Pharmacy for eight years and was one of the driving forces to pass the state's first pharmacy law. He held Michigan's pharmacy license #1 all the years he practiced.

Like all good pharmacists, Vernor also had a soda fountain in his drug store.

As demand grew, Vernor began to sell his product to other Detroit soda fountains, but required that vendors purchase special equipment to serve the soda in order to ensure its quality. After gaining enough fame, Vernor was able to sell his soda throughout the Midwest. In 1896, he closed his pharmacy and opened a bottling plant at the foot of Woodward so that Vernors could be mass produced. 

James Vernor passed away at the age of 84 in 1927. The Vernor family was once asked when the first Mr. Vernor retired from business. The answer was, "A few hours before he died." He was a hard-working and energetic man. One that made his mark on the city of Detroit with both business and civic contributions.

The second James Vernor came into the business as early as he could, working alongside his father in the old drug store. In the beginning, the father and son team were the only employees. They often worked 16 hour days together washing bottles, making and bottling the ginger ale, delivering it to various sites in the city, and taking care of clerical duties. He was born in Detroit on March 25, 1877. It wasn't until his father died in 1927, though, that he became President of the James Vernor Company. It was in a great way due to the second James Vernor's influence and style that the company grew into an international organization. In 1896, James Vernor II entered the business and his father decided to concentrate full time on ginger ale.

The same standards that had been applied to the consistency of his prescriptions were applied to the consistency of Vernor's Ginger Ale. The water had to be specially purified. The blending needed the finest Jamaican Ginger distilled in the absolute proper proportion with other fruit juices. Even the carbonic gas used was produced by Vernor so it would meet their requirements.

In 1896, James Vernor II entered the business and his father decided to concentrate full time on ginger ale.

The drug store was closed in 1896 and a small plant established at the foot of Woodward Avenue, several blocks from his former drug store's location. The plant was devoted to the blending, aging, and bottling of Vernor's Ginger Ale.

In 1918, Vernor purchased the old Riverside Power Plant. In 1919 a six story main building was erected adjacent to the other two. In 1939, the 10-story Siegel building was purchased and renovated. In 1941, the "most modern bottling facility in the world" was completed at 239 Woodward Avenue.

The plant also had a spectacular soda fountain. Everyone who lived in Detroit in the 1940's and 1950's has a story about going to the Vernor's soda fountain, usually before or after a ride on the Bob-lo Boat. One of the favorite drinks to have was a Boston Cooler. The drink is a milkshake-like mixture of Vernor's and vanilla ice cream. Contrary to many incorrect web sites, the Boston Cooler is not named after Boston Boulevard in Detroit. At that period of time, any soda pop mixed with ice cream was called a Boston Cooler. So, you could have a Hire's Boston Cooler or a Vernor's Boston Cooler. Vernor's copyrighted the name in the late 1960’s.

James Vernor II had a son; another James Vernor. James Vernor III also had a son; James Vernor. Yet, the company did not pass on to either one of them. It is impossible to predict if the company would have remained in the family if either had been president. J. Vernor Davis, the grandson of the founder, took over the presidency of the company.

The James Vernor Company had always been a family owned company. The death of James Vernor II in 1954 forced the company to sell some stock to the public. In 1957, James Vernor III died. His majority ownership of Vernor’s went through a court battle and was ultimately sold to investors. As a result, Vernor’s was no longer in the hands of the founding family. Vernor's became Vernors in 1959. (Note the lack of the apostrophe between the 'r' and the 's'.)

Vernor Davis had been with the firm since 1931. Prior to the death of his uncle, he became president of the company, in 1952. James Vernor III was concurrently named vice president. Under Davis' leadership, company sales grew tremendously. A stockholder's annual report from 1963 indicates sales grew from just over $6,000,000 in 1961 to over $9,000,000 in 1963.

In 1966, the one hundredth birthday of the James Vernor Company, Davis became chairman of the board. That same year, Vernors was sold to another group of investors, members of the New York Stock Exchange. The company would soon go through a number of different owners.

Again in 1971, Vernors was sold to American Consumer Products. By 1979, another company, United Brands, owned Vernors. This ownership would be the one most costly to the City of Detroit. In January of 1985, Cincinnati-based United Brands abruptly ended bottling operations at the plant.

The property was purchased in 1986 by Shula Associates, who had plans to knock it down for a shopping mall. The plant was eventually demolished in 1987. A high-rise apartment building for Wayne State University is now on the Cass Avenue side of the site. On the Woodward frontage, a four story apartment complex with first floor retail space has been built. The property is directly north of the Whitney Restaurant and two properties north of Hop Cat Detroit.

Just two years after abandoning Detroit, United Brands sold Vernors to A & W Brands. All of A & W was subsequently purchased by Dr. Pepper/Cadbury in 1993. In 1996, Dr. Pepper/Cadbury merged with 7UP and moved to Plano. Cadbury continued to own Vernor's until stock holders made the candy company give up the beverage firm. Dr Pepper Snapple was born! The company merged with Keurig and is now Keurig Dr Pepper. The company has been very supportive of the Vernor's brand.

[sohannabarberaesque]

You can just imagine how many Hanna-Barbera Funtastics could be considered Vernor's addicts just by the sheer barrel-aged mellowness of the taste.

I’m tired of having Covid. Time for the big guns

[70sscifiart]

Paul Lehr's 1969 cover to 'Grimm's World' by Vernor Vinge

[input-command]

Made a Tine! Her name is "Seeker" or "Ramdimirukam" Carver and I have been obsessed over this book/species for a while now.

Tines are a pack species from "A Fire Upon the Deep" - What you see here is one character, spread between four fragments. They use those patches on their heads and hips to transmit thoughts through the air, and to receive thoughts of nearby members. I very highly recommend the book. It is so much better than I can do it justice

[retzin]

Percys I drew before I got horribly sick. I think I'm gonna die

[sohannabarberaesque]

Food for thought:

How would your favourite Hanna-Barbera characters react to the sight of this or similar vehicles ... especially if it were dispensing some other soft drink like Moxie, Vernor's, Ale81 or Cheerwine?

Coca-Cola dispenser truck, 1934

[colemanm]

The Zones of thought from Vernor Vinge's eponymous science fiction series.

[spacekidcomics]

new episode of Not That Magic: Tales of Vernor Magus (the Wizard of More Or Less)

[thelastofthebookworms]

You'll find the other polls in my 'sf polls' tag / my pinned post.

[adelaiy]

Thanks for the translation into English - Erika-xero  

[detroitlib]

View of the Club Martin, located at 77 East Vernor Highway. Man stands on sidewalk with hose; automobile on right. Sign on building reads: "Club Martin, dining, dancing." Stamped on back: "Free Press." Handwritten on back: "Martin W. Cohn and new cabaret next door to Study Club." 1930.

Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library

[justforbooks]

One day in 1979, while logged in to San Diego State University’s principal computer from his home, Vernor Vinge found himself chatting to another user via the TALK program, both using implausible names and trying to figure out each other’s true name. “Afterwards, I realised that I had just lived a science-fiction story – at least by the standards of my childhood,” recalled Vinge, a mathematics and computer science teacher at the university, who has died from Parkinson’s disease aged 79.

The encounter was the starting point for his novella True Names (1981), one of the first sci-fi stories to predict an internet that is remarkably familiar to us 40 years later, with its fully immersive multiplayer role-playing games, dark web, hackers and trolls. Its descriptions of a virtual reality battle between Mr Slippery and the Mailman predated William Gibson’s Neuromancer by three years and, while it was Gibson who named “cyberspace”, Vinge was the godparent of its iconography.

At a meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 1982, Vinge coined the term “the Singularity” to describe the increasingly rapid acceleration of AI; he expanded on the concept in an editorial in the science and sci-fi magazine Omni, in which he said: “We will soon create intelligences greater than our own. When this happens … the world will pass beyond our understanding.”

A decade later, in The Coming Technological Singularity (1993), Vinge predicted that within 30 years “we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”

In his novel Marooned in Realtime (1986), a singularity event in the 23rd century known as “the Extinction” has repercussions 50 million years in the future, when only a handful of humans have been able to survive in “bobbles”, impenetrable force fields in which time slows to zero. One of the scientists trying to reconnect humanity is murdered – perhaps uniquely for a locked-room murder mystery, she is locked outside. This was a sequel to The Peace War (1984), in which the new stasis technology is shown to be misused by the ruling Peace Authority.

Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep (1992) and its prequel A Deepness in the Sky (1999) both won Hugo awards. A fine example of how Vinge could be rigorously true to his scientific beliefs without it limiting his ability to write galaxy-spanning space opera, A Fire Upon the Deep sidestepped the inevitability of all civilisations destroying themselves by dividing the Milky Way into “zones of thought”: the galaxy centre being the Unthinking Depths, surrounded by the Slow Zone and, a little further out, the Beyond, leading into Transcend. In this way he could write a far future-set adventure, where discoveries among the relics of a long-dead civilisation lead to the emergence of a malevolent AI called the Blight.

A Deepness in the Sky is set 30,000 years earlier, the characters unaware of the zones of thought, which makes it almost a standalone epic about an emerging spider civilisation unaware that it is being battled over by space-faring races.

Vinge won more Hugos, for the novellas Fast Times at Fairmont High (2001) and The Cookie Monster (2003) and the novel Rainbow’s End (2006), set in a near future dominated by augmented reality.

Born in Waukesha, Wisconsin, the son of Clarence Vinge, a teacher at the state college, and his wife, Ada (nee Rolands), Vernor earned a mathematics degree from Michigan State University in 1966, and a master’s (1968) and PhD (1971) from the University of California, San Diego. He began working as an assistant professor at San Diego State University in 1972, rising to associate professor of mathematics in 1978, and retiring in 2000.

Vinge described his youthful self as an imaginative child who “wanted interstellar empires (interplanetary ones at the least). I wanted supercomputers and artificial intelligence and effective immortality. All seemed possible.” Science fiction was his window into this world. He began writing as a teenager, selling one story, Apartness, to Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds magazine in 1965 and Bookworm, Run, a story involving an escaped chimp with enhanced intelligence, to John W Campbell’s Analog in 1966.

Damon Knight published Grimm’s Story in his 1968 anthology Orbit, and asked if Vinge could expand it into a novel. He could, as Grimm’s World (1969, later revised and expanded as Tatja Grimm’s World, 1987), with Tatja Grimm the ruler of a primitive planet who reaches out to greater civilisations, only to be beset by slavers. The Witling (1976) featured a world in which everyone has the power to teleport, and a shipwrecked anthropological team from Earth who are considered low-status “witlings” (half-wits), fit only for slavery.

Vinge’s last published novel, The Children of the Sky (2011) was a sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep. While he then retired from writing (only two vignettes were published later), his body of work continued to be recognised with various honours, including the Robert A Heinlein award in 2020, rewarding “an author whose body of work inspires the human exploration of space”.

Vinge married Joan Dennison in 1972; she wrote under the name of Joan D Vinge, and they divorced in 1979. He is survived by his sister, Patricia.

🔔 Vernor Steffen Vinge, mathematician, computer scientist and writer, born 2 October 1944; died 20 March 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[ginger-ale-official]

I fully believed your icon was a duck until now. in my defense icons are very small and yours has duck colors

A lot of people seem to think that how funny,

[thethirdromana]

I was very saddened to hear that Vernor Vinge, one of my favourite sci-fi authors, has passed away. Marooned in Realtime in particular is just utterly brilliant.

[keeps-ache]

The OCs you posted recently look really cool- could you talk a bit about them? Maybe the antagonists as well?

!! oh thank you :D

suuure yea :>> it's a smaller, newer thing of mine so not a lot n some of it may change!! but here's some profiles lol,

✧ Tide (the square head; they/them) is some sort of creature thing who lives in a remnant of an old world that decayed a long time ago after finding themself trapped there (that changes after they meet the goddess). they're head over heels for the goddess that still remains in the corridors there and they're not very normal about it hbfhvs - they can't be killed by any regular shmegular means and i have fun with that loll

✧ Vernor (ponytail gal; she/her) i don't have a lot for her, but she ended up in the same place Tide did and is very upset about it, understandably. she's good a martial arts and cries easily, and is pretty suspicious of most strangers :) she has a small knife-thing that works like a witch's broom (you have to hold the little handle for dear life though lmao) but i haven't gotten around to drawing it so !

✧ Dire (red circle; he/him) was created by the aforementioned goddess to dump emotions/thoughts she didn't want into, and then just sent him on his way lmfvhsh - because of that he is confused most of the time and still pretends to know everything but is figuring things out for real lol :3👍he hates to change his clothing and is snappy, and the snappiness may get worse on personal proximity hbfshv

^ these three have a Thing goin on. mostly qpp cuz i think it's fun :33

✧ Sleepy (the antagonist, he/him) the elusive guy. elusive bc i haven't drawn him lmfsh - another budy trapped in this old chunk of a dead world, he is also upset about it but to a much more desperate extent lol - his name isn't actually Sleepy but Tide nicknamed him that when they first met and now he can't seem to shake it hfsh, he Does hate it :) he is violent but he can play nicies so he does that most time loll

✧ the goddess (only thing holding this world together, She/her/it (capitalization is optional :3)) has been here for ages, ages, ages. her world's been long dead but she just keeps living for the monotony of it hfsh; plus, it's like her job never ended if she just keeps doing the same regular things she always did. bc of that it's actually preserved her chunk of annihilation, and sucks other creatures in w/o her knowing. the chunk is like a maze that keeps changing shape, so unless you can see it from a god's eyes the place is iiiiiinfinite! and terrible; the place changes to her moods and wishes, which can be interpreted p strangely lol :3 she's talked to and kept Tide around bc she needed somebody to deal with all these weird people coming into her dang house, and it's worked out fairly well (dubious)! :D

the world-chunk is inspired by vaporwave, abandoned malls, and the distinct smell of chlorine my mother has sometimes loll :)