Fizz (2 page)

More than two hundred years later, in 1535, the Swiss-German physician Theophrastus Paracelsus began to study the waters of Bad Pfäffer, Switzerland. Paracelsus believed that an imbalance of minerals in the body caused illness, and he tried to re-create the Swiss spring's mineral-rich waters without success. His theories did lead him to pioneer the use of chemicals and minerals in medicine. His belief that astrological talismans could cure disease proved less successful. But the 1600s finally saw some breakthroughs.

In the first half of the century the Flemish scientist Jan Baptist van Helmont identified a number of different gases through a series of experiments with mineral water, fermenting wine, and charcoal. One of these gases he named
spiritus sylvestris,
known today as carbon dioxide—the gas responsible for most of the fizz in naturally effervescent waters. In 1684 the Anglo-Irish scientist Robert Boyle published
Short Memoirs for the Natural Experimental History of Mineral Waters.
Boyle's publication drew on his own studies of well waters in and around London and set out—for the first time—a clear method for analyzing the chemical composition of mineral water.

A year later, Friedrich Hoffmann, a professor of medicine at the University of Halle in Germany, published his own study of mineral waters in which he attacked the wilder beliefs people held about bubbling water while setting out an improved method for analyzing its content and potential health benefits. Physicians and naturalists, Hoffmann wrote, “have generally remained grossly ignorant” in their studies. “We must here note and reject that common imaginary notion, as to the existence of gold, silver,
lead, tin, antimony, etc. in these waters.” Hoffmann also had little time for physicians who subscribed to the ancient but largely untested belief in the healing powers of mineral water. “No less preposterous has been their manner of prescribing such waters,” wrote the German doctor, before dismissing such physicians as quacks.

Instead, he argued, physicians needed to pay attention to the minerals present in effervescent waters, because that was the source of their medicinal power. Based on his assessment of the composition of different waters, he identified several distinct types such as iron-containing “steel waters” and the “bitter purging waters” with their neutral salts. Steel waters, he claimed, would strengthen limbs and heal ulcers if people bathed in them, while the bitter purging waters of Sedlitz in Bohemia should be drunk as remedies for “intermitting fevers.” Hoffmann also suggested that these waters could be made artificially by putting plain water, acid, and alkali in a bottle and shaking it vigorously. But when he tried to put this theory into practice, Hoffmann was unable to replicate the waters as he hoped.

In the following century, however, Europe's leading scientists would finally decode the secrets of the effervescent springs in a rush of breakthroughs. The gases of the air were identified, as were processes for producing “fixed air,” as carbon dioxide was now being called, by applying acid to chalk. In 1741 William Brownrigg, the English physician who identified platinum as an element, confirmed that the gas found within the acclaimed waters of Pyrmont in Germany was fixed air. In 1750 the Frenchman Gabriel Venel demonstrated a way of duplicating the waters of Selters, Germany, before the French Academy of Sciences in Paris. Venel succeeded in creating his bubbly “aerated water,” but his process also left an unpleasant residue of salts in the liquid. It was a step nearer but still far from the real thing. By 1766 Henry Cavendish, the English scientist who discovered hydrogen, had established a method for producing fixed air and testing its solubility in water.

These various strands of research into salts, gases, and the generation of carbon dioxide eventually came together when Joseph Priestley began his own experiments with mineral water. Born in the West Yorkshire village of Birstall on March 13, 1733, Priestley was a remarkable child. At the age
of four he could recite all of the 107 theological questions and answers that formed the Westminster Shorter Catechism, and at school he proved himself a capable student of Greek, Hebrew, Latin, algebra, math, physics, and philosophy. When a serious life-threatening illness left him with a stutter, he began to question his Calvinist upbringing. After further theological study, he became a Presbyterian minister. But while religion was central to his life, Priestley—like many scientists of the age—was a polymath who effortlessly moved between studying history, higher mathematics, physics, and foreign languages.

Science was a particular fascination for the devout Presbyterian. He believed that science was a force for good that could improve the quality of all human life, a belief that fit perfectly with his religious convictions. One of the first scientific subjects he studied was electricity. He hoped electricity could purify fixed air produced by the burning of charcoal. It turned out it couldn't. But his experiments led him to suggest that, just like gravity, as the distance between two electrically charged objects increased, the forces of attraction and repulsion between them decreased by the square of that distance. Priestley's theory was later proved by the French physicist Charles-Augustin de Coulomb and became known as Coulomb's law, a crucial step in the development of the science of electromagnetism.

After his electrical experiments, Priestley turned his attention to mineral water and how it could be made. Like many, Priestley believed that mineral water could heal numerous ailments, and doubtless he thought that perfecting a method for producing it artificially would greatly benefit the health of all humanity. As it happened, Priestley's home in the English city of Leeds was next to a large brewery, and the smell of the fermenting grain in its vats attracted his attention. In the summer of 1767, aware that the gas produced by fermentation was fixed air, he began a series of experiments with the aim of capturing the gas emerging from the vats within plain water. Eventually he succeeded by pouring water back and forth between containers that were held above the vats of fermenting beer until the water became carbonated. The fizzy drink had been born.

In 1772, having refined the process, Priestley presented his findings to the Royal Society of London and published a paper called “Directions for
Impregnating Water with Fixed Air” that explained how to create carbonated water. Priestley's method required a narrow-necked glass vessel to be filled with distilled or filtered water before being placed upside down in a basin that contained enough water to cover its neck. A leather pipe attached to a pig's bladder would then be inserted into the neck of the upside-down container. Next, a small amount of sulfuric acid would be poured into a phial two-thirds full of chalk that had been covered with water. As the acid reacted with the chalk to produce carbon dioxide gas, the other end of the bladder, which contained a cork through which a quill had been inserted to create a narrow pipe, would be plugged into the neck of the phial.

Briskly shaking the phial would encourage the production of carbon dioxide, which would fill up the bladder. The gas could then be pumped into the upturned glass vessel through the leather pipe. Once enough carbon dioxide had been pumped in to push most of the water out into the basin, the gas-filled container would be vigorously shaken for fifteen minutes so that the water and gas would mix and produce fizzy water.

Priestley's approach was a sensation. For centuries people had been trying to duplicate the magical waters of nature and now, decades upon decades upon decades worth of study had finally produced a definitive methodology. The Royal Society and Priestley thought it was the start of a medical and travel revolution since they erroneously believed that carbonated water could cure scurvy, the horrific disease that killed at least two million sailors between 1500 and 1800. A lack of fixed air in the blood caused scurvy, Priestley argued, therefore drinking water impregnated with the gas would cure it.

The Royal Society agreed. In the same year that Priestley presented his findings, the society gave the explorer James Cook the equipment necessary to carbonate water, hoping it would prevent scurvy among his men as he set sail to find Australia. The following year, while Captain Cook continued his voyage, the Royal Society awarded Priestley its highest honor, the Copley Medal, in recognition of his fizzy water experiments. Captain Cook returned without a single incident of scurvy among the crew, but it had nothing to do with Priestley's work and everything to do with the vitamin C in the fresh fruit and vegetables he and his men collected during their journey.

Even though Priestley's carbonated water didn't end the curse of scurvy, his work altered the world in many other ways. In the 250 years that followed, the fruits of his labor reshaped cities, built nations, and made US presidents. It spawned the world's biggest brand, altered our shopping habits, and transformed our drinking habits. It ushered in consumer protection laws, funded organized crime, expanded our waistlines, and redefined sales and marketing. It would even go into space. The Age of Soda had begun, and this is the story of how those fun, fizzing, pinging bubbles changed the world around us.

The life of Jean Jacob Schweppe began like a fairy tale. He was born in 1740 in Witzenhausen, a small village of Germanic half-timbered buildings nestled among the wooded banks of the winding Werra River and famed for its cherry wines. On a hilltop to the southwest stood the fifteenth-century castle of Burg Ludwigstein, with its tall cone-topped tower overlooking a landscape of rolling countryside and forests that were the source for many of the fables that inspired the Brothers Grimm.

Most of the 1,460 people who lived in Witzenhausen back then worked in agriculture, and Schweppe's family was no exception. But Schweppe was a delicate child, and his parents fretted that their gray-eyed son would not be able to withstand the rigors of a life in farming. So when Schweppe was eleven or twelve years old, his parents asked a tinker who was passing through the village to take the boy with him, hoping that the traveling tinsmith could give their son a trade.

The tinker soon returned. The young Schweppe, he explained, had a hidden talent for precision metalwork that was far too good to waste on the lowly work of tinkering. They should get the boy an apprenticeship with a silversmith instead. Schweppe's parents did as suggested, only for the silversmith to decide that the boy's talent was too good for basic silver and gold work. So Schweppe was packed off once more, this time to become the apprentice of a jewelry maker.

On finishing his apprenticeship, Schweppe headed for Geneva, the renowned hub of watch and jewelry making. By the end of 1765 he was running a successful jewelers' shop in the city, and he had married local woman Eléonore Roget. Schweppe's talent took him far in Genevese society, and in 1777 the jewelry makers' guild named him a master jeweler.

As well as a naturally talented jeweler, Schweppe was a keen amateur scientist. He would buy and read all the science journals, and he enjoyed replicating the experiments detailed within their pages. One of the scientific papers he came across was Joseph Priestley's explanation of how to create carbonated water. The idea of re-creating the bubbling waters of nature intrigued Schweppe. Keen to find out what artificial mineral water tasted like, he built a replica of Priestley's apparatus and produced his first batch of fizzy water. Schweppe's perfectionist streak got the better of him. While impressed by Priestley's breakthrough, the master jeweler felt the resulting waters were no match for the real thing. He became obsessed with trying to improve the equipment to produce superior carbonated waters. Day after day, his five-foot-three frame hunched over scientific papers and equipment as he tried to engineer a carbonation system that would put the waters of Priestley to shame.

He had a working system in place by 1780, but he would spend the next three years perfecting it. Schweppe's big advance was the addition of a crank-operated compression pump. This pump would draw carbon dioxide gas from a gasometer and water from a tank into a barrel that would also be shaken by the turning of the crank, churning the incoming water and gas to create fizzy water. It was easier, faster, and more effective than Priestley's bladder and basin apparatus, and it allowed Schweppe to produce greater volumes of more intensely carbonated water.

Rather than waste the bubbly waters he made, Schweppe started giving them away to local doctors, hoping that they could use it to treat the city's poor. But many of those he offered his water to refused to take it for free, insisting that he charge them for such beneficial waters. Schweppe reluctantly agreed to charge a small fee to cover his expenses.

Word began to spread of the jeweler's impressive waters. By the end of the 1780s his water was even being exported outside Switzerland in ceramic
stoneware bottles that Schweppe insisted on having laid flat during transit so that the moistened cork expanded to prevent the gas from escaping and the water from turning flat. As his philanthropic sideline morphed into a thriving business, the trusting Schweppe hired a friend to help him produce and sell his water. His friend used the opportunity to try to figure out the secret of Schweppe's apparatus so he could start a rival business. But on examining the equipment, the deceitful buddy found himself out of his depth. So he turned to another Genevese for help: Nicolas Paul, a brilliant mechanic who maintained La Machine Hydraulique, the pump house that supplied the fountains of Geneva with water from the Rhône.