Fizz (6 page)

One leading light of fountain manufacturing was the Englishman John Matthews, who immigrated to America in 1832. Matthews learned how to build fountain equipment back in Britain while working as a teenage apprentice for Joseph Braham, the inventor of the hydraulic press. On arriving in New York he opened a soda fountain on Gold Street and assembled a fountain of his own design that produced carbon dioxide by applying sulfuric acid to marble—a process that had replaced the use of bicarbonate of soda. (Even so, people kept calling the resulting beverage “soda.”) Unlike many fountain owners, however, Matthews had big ambitions. After getting his own fountain up and running, he started buying his competitors. He swallowed Usher's old business, snapped up businesses with valuable patents for soda fountain equipment, and began designing, manufacturing, and building fountains to sell to others. Matthews became one of the kingpins of the soda business, and like his competitors, his company began producing ever more exotic fountain apparatus. Among them was the $2,976
Frost King. The Frost King knew nothing of subtlety. Aimed at upmarket stores in large cities, it boasted glass nozzles, bronze fittings, gas illumination, sixty jewel stones embedded in its frame, and carvings of medieval fantasies in its polished marble exterior.

Matthews's rivals also pulled out all the stops. The equally successful James Tufts of Medford, Massachusetts, was just as prone to grandiose designs. He moved beyond the white Italian marble used in the early fountains and introduced marble of attractive red, velvet black, chocolate laced with white frosting, and—most expensive of all—the majestic swirls of Mexican onyx. But his most excessive creation came in 1876 when he unveiled the ultimate in soda fountain excess at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia: the Arctic Soda Water Apparatus. This monster fountain stood thirty-three feet high, weighed thirty tons, and measured twelve feet in diameter. It could dispense twenty-eight types of water and store seventy-six different flavoring syrups and was capped off with hanging ferns, a chandelier, and a device for spraying perfume into the air. This lavish beast ended up at Coney Island after the exposition. In 1886 it was moved to the premises of the Famous Clothing Company, a department store in St. Louis. Shoppers came from miles around to get a glimpse of Tufts's most outrageous creation. Its fame, however, was short-lived. In November 1891 a fire tore through the department store, destroying both the Famous Clothing Company and its spectacular soda fountain.

Other developments in fountain design were more practical. Gustavus Dows of Lowell, Massachusetts, launched his fountain-making enterprise in the late 1850s after becoming fed up with the tiring and hand-numbing task of shaving ice for the drinks served at his older brother's soda fountain. He built a fountain that housed a crank-operated ice shaver as well as tanks for storing flavoring syrups. He named his creation the Ice Cream Soda Apparatus and sold it to fountains throughout the United States for $225 each. Despite its name, Dows's fountain had nothing to do with ice cream soda as we know it today. The reference was a nod to the pre-Civil War practice of mixing sweet cream into soda water.

The modern-day ice cream soda, or float, came a few years later. There are numerous stories about the origin of ice cream soda, but the most
convincing claim is that of Robert McCay Green, a small-time fountain manufacturer who introduced it during an 1874 exhibition at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Worried that the lavish creations of bigger rivals such as Dows and Matthews would overshadow his more modest fountain designs, he started looking for a way to stand out from the crowd. Green thought about how people would often drink a soda while eating ice cream, and he decided to combine the two by serving sodas with a dollop of ice cream dunked into the fizz. When the exhibition opened he handed out flyers with a call to action: “Something new! Green's Ice Cream Soda, try it and tell your friends.”

The first day was a disaster. Green sold just eight dollars of ice cream soda. Undaunted, Green returned the next day with a new ploy. He went around the exhibition offering teenagers a free ice cream soda if they came to his fountain at a set time. When the time came a throng of young men and women gathered around his fountain. The youthful crowd caught the interest of others, and then the teens to whom he gave the free ice cream sodas began telling others of this unusual but tasty fusion of food and drink. By the end of the exhibition Green was raking in $200 a day. After the exhibition, news of this new recipe spread far and wide. People began asking their local soda fountains to make it for them. Fountain owners, by and large, weren't too pleased about this. It took longer to make than a standard soda drink, and even worse, it took longer for people to consume it. This meant that customers hogged precious seating space for even longer—especially important at a time when ordering a drink and taking it away to gulp down on the streets was socially unacceptable. As irritating as the ice cream soda was for store owners, it was too popular with the public to ignore, so the reluctant fountain owners served it. Green's creation would also provide the inspiration for the sundae, which—the story goes—was invented in Evanston, Illinois, during 1890 after the pious town council banned the serving of ice cream soda on Sundays. Unwilling to be bossed around by these city fathers, one druggist got around the rules by serving ice cream covered in soda syrup that he only served on Sundays. Word of his Sunday treat spread to Chicago before being adopted by fountains throughout the nation.

While the fountains thrived, bottled soda struggled to make similar inroads. Although the War of 1812 derailed Silliman's ambitions, it ultimately helped America's glass industry by prompting the imposition of import tariffs on foreign goods in 1824. This tax amounted to just over a penny a bottle, but that was enough to eliminate Europe's price advantage and make the business of glass making a more profitable venture. And as America's glass industry gathered momentum, bottled soda became a more common sight.

One of the first people to see the potential in bottled soda was Eugene Roussel. Born in France in 1810, Roussel worked as a perfumer in Paris before moving to the United States in July 1838. He settled in Philadelphia and opened a store at 75 Chestnut Street. Roussel's emporium sold toiletries imported from France and Britain, ranging from perfumes and fragrant soaps to skin creams and hair dyes. He also sold bottles of lemon-flavored mineral water, an idea inspired by the bottled waters on sale in Paris. Roussel's flavored water, which came in French-style glass bottles, proved an instant hit with his wealthy clientele. During 1839 he sold 120 to 180 bottles a day and its enduring popularity led him to bring his soda to New York in 1845. Before the end of the 1840s, Roussel had sold his Philadelphia store to focus full-time on his flavored fizz, which by then was even being advertised in the frontier state of Wisconsin.

Yet while Roussel's upscale soda business thrived and inspired dozens of competitors, the bottling of carbonated drinks was still dogged by the challenge of how to retain the fizz. Throughout the 1800s people experimented with hundreds of different approaches to sealing bottles. There were the egg-shaped bottles that relied on the liquid engorging the cork, but even then the gas would seep out—and if sealed incorrectly, the cork was liable to shoot out due to the pressure inside the container. Another method involved placing glass-ball stoppers in the neck of the bottle. The bottle would then be sealed by pulling the ball up using a hook embedded within it so that the stopper wedged itself in the neck to create a seal. To open the bottle, drinkers would push down on the hook to force the ball back into the bottle. While this approach kept the fizz, the ball was hard to wash, increasing the risk of the drink becoming contaminated. Another approach
was the swing stopper, which is still used on bottles of Grolsch lager. This method used wire to hold the stopper tightly in place and allowed drinkers to pop open the bottle using a wire lever attached to the neck. It was easier to clean than the ball stopper but more expensive to make.

It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that the sealing problems plaguing bottled soda were finally resolved with the invention of the Crown Cork bottle cap by William Painter in 1892. The edges of these single-use metal caps would be crimped around the neck of bottles by machine to provide an airtight seal. The caps were cheap and the machine-based sealing method meant soda could be bottled faster than by the hand-based methods that preceded it, a point underscored by Painter's 1898 invention the Crown Soda Machine. This machine condensed the soda bottling process into a single device that was capable of mixing the syrup and water, filling the bottles, and attaching the caps. It streamlined the bottling process and paved the way for the mass production of bottled soda that followed in the twentieth century.

While soda bottlers struggled with sealing technology, the fountains dominated, offering cheaper, colder beverages and more flavors to choose from, thanks to the ever-expanding range of flavoring syrups being created. As in Europe, the exact origin of the use of flavoring syrup in America is unclear, but it was certainly happening in 1807, when Townsend Speakman began stirring up his Nephite Julep, a mix of fruit juice and soda water, for the customers of his Philadelphia apothecary store. By the middle of the 1800s, visitors to the soda fountains faced a bewildering range of flavoring options to liven up their soda water. There were familiar fruit flavors, exotic plants, alcoholic concoctions, and—since fountains were often located in pharmacies—even the medical ingredients that druggists would use to cook up the lotions, pills, and potions that they sold to the public with unsubstantiated claims about their benefits.

Soda drinkers could spice up their fizzy water with enduring favorites such as wintergreen, vanilla, or cherry, or they could opt for something more unusual such as hock, syrup of violets, or celery. To keep people interested, soda fountain operators, who were now nicknamed soda jerks due to the jerking motion they made when pumping out water for their customers, started mixing up new taste combinations for customers to try.
Some mixed sweet cream into the cool bubbling water to create the original cream sodas. Others made chocolate syrups and used them to create chocolate-flavored soda waters that proved a big hit with women. Men tended to opt for the egg sodas, in which soda water and uncooked egg white were stirred together to produce a beverage with a foamy head. The egg sodas eventually spawned the original version of the egg cream, where cream, egg yolk, and soda met. Other soda jerks reached for the chemical cabinets of their stores and chucked in phosphoric acid to create phosphates, a type of soda that offered a pleasing acidic tang.

It was a fad business. For years egg cream would be all the rage, then everyone would go nuts for phosphates before dumping them for some new exciting soda combination. This constant stream of new spins on soda in nineteenth-century America was driven by competition, with fountains hoping to win business by whipping up flavors that couldn't be found elsewhere. Yet while the soda jerks and pharmacists concocted new, head-turning combinations, there were plenty of enduring favorites such as orange, lemon, vanilla, and the 1800s wonder plant sarsaparilla.

Native to Central America, the sarsaparilla plant had long been regarded by the native people as having medicinal properties, and when the first samples were taken back to Europe in the 1500s it gained a reputation as a cure for syphilis. After the initial excitement about its discovery died down, the plant fell into disuse for many years until the patent medicine boom of the 1800s reignited interest in its medical potential. Physicians reassessed sarsaparilla and declared that as well as curing syphilis, it was also effective against scrofula and skin ailments. Some went so far as to add cancer, rheumatism, hepatitis, and gout to the list of diseases this wonder plant could treat. In 1820 the renewed hype was convincing enough to earn sarsaparilla syrup a place in the first United States Pharmacopeia, which also included soda water among its definitive list of medicines. For soda fountains this was a double win. Not only did they get to promote the health benefits of their carbonated water, but the addition of sarsaparilla syrup also let them effortlessly tap into the appeal of the patent medicine. Soon sarsaparilla was one of the most popular flavors at the fountains, providing an early indication of how the soda business would soon embrace both the cookbook of quack medicine and its advertising rulebook too.

The soda fountain wasn't the only health craze taking America by storm in the early 1800s. As the fountains arrived on Main Street, thousands of people were embracing the ideas of Samuel Thomson, the Pied Piper of quackery. An illiterate pig farmer turned herbal healer, Thomson was an unlikely health icon, but by the 1810s his firebrand approach to medicine had won him legions of devoted followers.

Born in February 1769, Thomson grew up poor on an isolated New Hampshire farm. The nearest doctor lived more than ten miles away, so his family relied on the folk medicine of a neighboring widow for their medical care. “The whole of her practice was with roots and herbs, applied to the patient, or given in hot drinks, to produce sweating; which always answered the purpose,” Thomson recalled many years later.