Atlanta, capital of the state of Georgia, is in almost all respects the principal centre of the American South. It lies in the foreland of the southern foothills of the Piedmont Plateau, on the watershed between the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic. The city was originally planned as a railway junction, and rapidly developed into an important commercial town. In recent years it has become a major economic and cultural centre in the American southeast and an important hub of air traffic. In 1868 Atlanta became capital of the young state of Georgia. In 1886 the soft drink with the largest world sales was created in Atlanta. Large areas of the city were destroyed by a great fire in 1917. In 1929 Martin Luther King was born in Atlanta. After the Second World War Atlanta enjoyed a huge economic upswing. It is the capital of and the most populous city in the U.S. state of Georgia, with an estimated 2016 population of 472,522. Atlanta is the cultural and economic centre o​f the Atlanta metropolitan area, home to 5,710,795 people and the ninth-largest metropolitan area in the United States.