Fizz Page 2
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.
1
The Beverage of Kings
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.
Paul took advantage of Schweppe’s double-crossing friend. After inspecting the equipment he built an inferior version for Schweppe’s traitorous pal, and for himself he built a version with improved mechanics and used it to launch his own artificial mineral water business. Schweppe didn’t want to compete with Paul, and instead he persuaded the talented engineer to go into business with him rather than against him. Paul brought in another partner, Henry Gosse, a Genevese pharmacist who shared Paul’s interest in hot air ballooning and kept a chest containing a mummified saint—or at least what the Parisian salesman he bought it from told him was a saint—in his pharmacy, much to the disgust of his employees, who refused to go near the creepy antique.
The new business was formed in April 1790 and the combination of Schweppe’s breakthrough, Paul’s refinements, and Gosse’s knowledge of chemistry made their imitation mineral waters even more popular. The trio started to think big. They talked of expanding into Paris, London, even Calcutta and Pondicherry in India. The partners eventually settled on starting their global expansion in London, and Schweppe landed the job of moving to the city and starting the business there. So in late 1791 the fifty-year-old Schweppe left his wife and his daughter Colette, the only one of his nine children who did not die at birth or before the age of 10, to make the journey from Geneva to London.
When Schweppe arrived in the British capital in January 1792, it was fast becoming the most populated city in the world. Its narrow cobbled streets, darkened by its tall buildings, teemed with carts, coaches, horses, people, pickpockets, rats, vagrants, and coffin-carrying undertakers. Coal fires belched out thick, choking clouds of soot, and despite the fine squares and splendid buildings that showcased the British Empire’s growing wealth, the place stank. It was said that if the wind was blowing in the right direction, London could be smelled long before it could be seen. The muddy waters of the River Thames were a mass of fast-flowing garbage that doubled as the city’s reservoir and sewer. With private toilets a l
uxury even among the rich, most people flung their excrement onto the streets, where it mixed with spoiled food and other waste before being washed by rain into open drains to putrefy while waiting for the “soil men” to come at night and shovel it onto carts so it could be dumped into the Thames. Worst of all, reported German visitor Charles Moritz in 1782, were the city’s butcher shops. “Guts and all the nastiness are thrown into the middle of the street, and cause an insupportable stench,” he reported to his countrymen on his return. Clean water was scarce too, and outbreaks of cholera and other diseases were a regular occurrence. In short, it was the perfect place to sell bottles of pure, healthful artificial mineral water.
The British, however, had not been idle in the twenty years that had passed since Priestley published his guide to producing artificial mineral water, and people across the country had started mineral water businesses. Priestley’s friend Richard Bewley, an apothecary from Great Massingham in Norfolk, got the ball rolling. In 1767 or 1768, after Priestley told him about his experiments with carbonated water, Bewley began producing fizzy water under the name Mr Bewley’s Mephitic Julep. Bewley’s operation was a small one, limited by the constraints of Priestley’s system, but others soon followed his lead.
Thomas Henry, an apothecary who ran a store on Manchester’s King Street and one of the city’s leading scientists, was one of those followers. After hearing about Mr Bewley’s Mephitic Julep, Henry built a carbonation device based on Priestley’s apparatus and started selling imitation mineral waters in the early 1770s. Henry regarded mineral water as a medicine, and he gave his customers strict instructions on its use. Take four ounces at a time, he would tell them, and make sure the bottle is kept tightly sealed so that the gas does not escape. But while his mineral water operation was bigger than Bewley’s, Henry was only able to produce carbonated water in small quantities until he came across Nooth’s Apparatus.
This superior carbonation device was the 1775 invention of John Nooth, a Scottish physician who believed Priestley’s apparatus was hard to use and that the pig bladder caused the resulting waters to taste of urine. Nooth’s solution was a device that consisted of three glass chambers stacked on top of each other and connected by valves. In the bottom chamber marble chips and sulfuric acid would be mixed to produce carbon dioxide. The gas would then rise into the central chamber, where it would mix with water drawn down from the uppermost chamber, which—thanks to the water inside it—also provided the pressure necessary to cause the gas to carbonate the liquid. The freshly fizzed water could then be dispensed from a faucet attached to the central chamber. The result was an eighteenth-century SodaStream, a device for making carbonated water at home that was small enough to sit on a sideboard. It also carbonated water more effectively than Priestley’s apparatus.
Priestley was far from amused, however, when Nooth explained that he made this glass contraption because Priestley’s method created water with a urinous flavor. The scientist-theologian responded that if the water Nooth made with Priestley’s apparatus tasted of urine that would be down to a servant relieving himself in his equipment and that Nooth deserved nothing less. But even Priestley had to concede that the Scottish physician had made the superior device.
Nooth’s Apparatus became wildly popular among rich Europeans. Within its first three years more than a thousand had been sold; in France, more people got their carbonated water from these devices than from bottles. Nooth’s Apparatus would evolve into the gasogene, which worked on the same principle but replaced the upper chamber and the faucet of the central chamber with a soda siphon. The gasogene would still be a common sight in 1891 when Dr. John Watson spied one lurking inside 221B Baker Street during Sherlock Holmes’s adventure A Scandal in Bohemia. Anesthesiologists also found that a slightly modified gasogene was ideal for vaporizing ether and delivering it to patients, and they used the device to create some of the very first ether inhalers.
Henry used a modified version of Nooth’s Apparatus to produce artificial mineral water in large enough quantities to secure a lucrative contract with Manchester Infirmary. The success of Henry’s mineral water business would eventually lead his son William to use the insights he had gained while working for his father to come up with Henry’s law, one of the physical laws explaining the nature and behavior of gases. Henry’s law stated that the amount of gas absorbed in water is in proportion to the pressure of the gas. This explained why carbonated water would keep its fizz when bottled under pressure but go flat when the pressure is reduced by opening the bottle. It also explained why more nitrogen is absorbed into the blood of divers at deeper depths, causing the drunken feeling of nitrogen narcosis and the risk of getting the bends, a life-threatening condition caused by the nitrogen fizzing out of the blood if the diver ascends too rapidly.
While Henry and his son fizzed up water for ill Mancunians, down in London the sight of mineral water makers roaming the streets and hawking their wares from carts was already common when Schweppe arrived in 1791. Despite the established competition, Schweppe was pleased to find that none of the British waters could match the level of fizz that his cutting-edge equipment could create. Schweppe opened a factory on Drury Lane, then a notorious slum packed with gin shops and prostitutes selling themselves for six pence. Keen to keep his carbonation technique secret this time, he added superfluous parts, hid the crank behind a useless wheel, and encased the equipment in wood so that no one could see how it worked. In spring 1792 the first waters he produced in Drury Lane went on sale, and Schweppe began sending samples to respected establishment figures, including Priestley, hoping to get glowing endorsements in return.
The endorsements never came, and Londoners ignored his waters. In July a depressed Schweppe wrote to his partners back in Geneva to tell them business was bad and he wanted to come home. They wrote back insisting that he stay. It was too soon to give up, they told him. Lonely, Schweppe asked his fifteen-year-old daughter Colette to travel to London to keep him company. It was a dangerous journey. The turmoil of the French Revolution was ongoing, and as she made her way to London that summer, an armed mob stormed the royal palace of Tuileries in Paris. While the mob massacred the five hundred Swiss Guards charged with protecting the palace, the French royal family fled through the gardens. The royals were eventually captured and imprisoned, and rumors of a counterrevolution spread panic through the country.
Despite the dangers, Colette made it to London, but Schweppe’s business situation was still dire. In December Paul and Gosse decided that Schweppe was right after all, and they sent him a letter telling him to pack his bags and return to Geneva. Schweppe was furious. They had made him stay in London and caused his daughter to make a perilous journey through revolutionary France. Now, he fumed, they wanted him and Colette to risk their health and life by traveling through France in winter. Schweppe wrote an angry letter to his business partners informing them that he would not be leaving London until winter was over. But when winter turned to spring it was too late to leave. France had declared war on Britain, making travel impossible. With Schweppe trapped in London, the partnership with Gosse and Paul fell apart. Paul and Gosse opened rival mineral water businesses in Geneva, and Schweppe returned to the task of trying to build up the London operation.
Schweppe slogged away, growing the business bottle by bottle until in 1796 he finally secured the high-profile endorsements he needed to win over London’s high society. The first endorsement came from Dr. George Pearson, the head physician at St. George’s Hospital. The second came from the prominent physician Erasmus Darwin, who in 1794 had published Zoonomia, a two-volume compendium of knowledge about the animal world that set out early ideas about evolution that his grandson Charles would develop further in The Origin of Species. Pearson’s and Darwin’s support turned Schweppe into the leading producer of carbonated water in London, although the joy of this long-awaited breakthrough was tainted by the death that very same year of his wife, whom he hadn’t seen since leaving for Britain. In
1798 Schweppe sold the business for the then-considerable sum of £1,200 to three businessmen from Jersey and returned to Geneva with Colette to spend his retirement tending peach trees.
The business that bore Schweppe’s name would go from strength to strength, rapidly outflanking Henry’s business to emerge as Britain’s leading maker of mineral water. Schweppe’s former colleague Paul also struggled to challenge the company’s position. In 1799 Paul left Geneva for Paris, where he impressed the French Faculty of Physicians with carbonated water so fizzy that the noise of its uncorking was compared to the sound of a pistol being fired. After mild success in Paris, Paul moved to London in 1802, by which time Schweppes was beginning to export its waters throughout the British Empire. By 1806 Paul gave up on London and returned to Geneva. He died that same year at the age of forty-three.
By the time Schweppe died in November 1821, British high society had made Schweppes its mineral water supplier of choice. Schweppes waters were a common sight in the gentlemen’s clubs of Pall Mall, the finest hotels, and the most exclusive restaurants. Almost every West End theater stocked Schweppes and Schweppes alone. Schweppes had even become the choice of royalty, with King William IV appointing the company as the royal household’s mineral water supplier in 1831.
Schweppes wasn’t the only imitation mineral water business that had caught the eye of the British king, for he had also endorsed the Royal German Spa in the seaside resort of Brighton. Opened in 1825, the spa was the brainchild of Frederick Struve, a chemist from Saxony who realized that spas no longer needed to be located at natural springs now that mineral waters could be fabricated. In 1818 he opened his first artificial spa in Dresden, which offered the city’s rich a choice of waters as well as a place to relax and socialize without the inconvenient travel that going to a spa usually involved. It was an instant success, and the king of Saxony rewarded him with an Order of Merit for his innovative spa resort. Struve opened a second in Leipzig and then a third in Berlin before embarking on an expansion that would see his artificial mineral water spas popping up all across Europe, from St. Petersburg and Moscow to Warsaw and Brighton.